First they solved the Sum of Three Cubes for the difficult number 33, then for the really difficult 42, and now the team led by Andrew Booker of Bristol University and Andrew Sutherland of MIT has discovered a mind-bogglingly vast solution for the insanely difficult number that had kept mathematicians guessing since 1953; the number 3.

Despite having two trivial solutions (1,1,1 and 4,4,-5) nobody really knew if there were any more – and if there were, they would be almost unimaginably difficult to find. Years of searching had turned up nothing, until now.

The numbers required are an astonishing 21 digits long and 7000x bigger than those required for the solution to 42 discovered earlier this month. Despite this huge increase, Booker and Sutherland used ingenious new algorithms to reduce the search space to something more manageable, and which could be successfully explored, once again, by the Charity Engine planetary computer grid of 500,000+ home PCs.

The first non-trivial solution for 3 therefore required ‘only’ four million compute-hours to reveal itself:

569936821221962380720^3 + (-569936821113563493509)^3 + (-472715493453327032)^3 = 3

Booker and Sutherland hope to crack even more ‘almost impossible’ math problems using Charity Engine over the coming weeks.