Customers were teenagers getting a cake for their school math event. I can’t lie, I am absolute garbage at math, lol. I can still do an awesome math cake though! I hope their jaws drop. I am super pleased with how this turned out, especially with getting to sneak Finn the Human in there ;)
We had an interesting discussion in our algebra department yesterday, about this innocuous-looking equation. I suggest you don’t try it, unless you’re equally happy with negative integer solutions or know something about elliptic curves!
As it turns out, the smallest positive integer solution has 80-digit numbers! Hence you won’t find these using brute-force computer searches without some insight on elliptic curves. If you want to read more about the mathematics behind this equation, read this delightful post on Quora by Alon Amit.
“You may have seen such meme images before. They are always pure click-bait garbage: “95% of MIT graduates couldn’t solve this!”, where “this” is some inane, or ill-defined, or trivial brain teaser.
This one is not. The meme is a clever, or wicked, joke. Roughly 99.999995% of the people don’t stand a chance at solving it, and that includes a good number of mathematicians at leading universities who just don’t happen to be number theorists. It is solvable, yes, but it’s really, genuinely hard.”
#the quora post is excellent
SECONDED
(In addition to providing a solution whose only incompleteness is that it omits most of headache-inducing transformation formulae, it also includes a rather extensive history of the problem… which confirms that it is indeed a wicked joke.)
