Math’s ‘Oldest Problem Ever’ Gets a New Answer
A new proof significantly strengthens a decades-old result about the ubiquity of ways to represent whole numbers as sums of unit fractions. The post Math’s ‘Oldest Problem Ever’ Gets a New Answer first appeared on Quanta Magazine
Number theorists are always looking for hidden structure. And when confronted by a numerical pattern that seems unavoidable, they test its mettle, trying hard — and often failing — to devise situations in which a given pattern cannot appear. One of the latest results to demonstrate the resilience of such patterns, by Thomas Bloom of the University of Oxford, answers a question with roots that...
Originally published in Quanta Abstractions.
