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After the Chamber Singers spring concert, conductor and Professor of Music Benjamin Locke (Doc Locke) reflects on his creative process and time at Kenyon.
z 3 = 3 might be obvious to any high school algebra student, where x, y, and z can be either 1, 1, and 1, or 4, 4, and -5. Finding a third solution, however, has stumped expert number theorists for decades, and in 1953 the puzzle prompted pioneering mathematician Louis Mordell to ask the question: Is it even possible to know whether other solutions for 3 exist? “This was sort of like Mordell throwing down the gauntlet,” says Sutherland. “The interest in solving this question is not so much for the particular solution, but to better understand how hard these equations are to solve. It’...
What do you do after solving the answer to life, the universe, and everything? If you're mathematicians Drew Sutherland and Andy Booker, you go for the...
E-Mail What do you do after solving the answer to life, the universe, and everything? If you're mathematicians Drew Sutherland and Andy Booker, you go for the harder problem. In 2019, Booker, at the University of Bristol, and Sutherland, principal research scientist at MIT, were the first to find the answer to 42. The number has pop culture significance as the fictional answer to "the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything," as Douglas Adams famously penned in his novel "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy." The question that begets 42, at least in the novel, is frustrati...