{"id":16292,"date":"2016-05-27T09:55:35","date_gmt":"2016-05-27T14:55:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bucktownbell.com\/?p=16292"},"modified":"2016-05-27T09:55:35","modified_gmt":"2016-05-27T14:55:35","slug":"two-hundred-terabyte-maths-proof-is-largest-ever","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/bucktownbell.com\/?p=16292","title":{"rendered":"Two-hundred-terabyte maths proof is largest ever"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>The puzzle that required the 200-terabyte proof, called the Boolean Pythagorean triples problem, has eluded mathematicians for decades. In the 1980s, Graham offered a prize of US$100 for anyone who could solve it. (He duly presented the cheque to one of the three computer scientists, Marijn Heule of the University of Texas at Austin, earlier this month.) The problem asks whether it is possible to colour each positive integer either red or blue, so that no trio of integers <i>a<\/i>, <i>b<\/i> and <i>c<\/i> that satisfy Pythagoras\u2019 famous equation <i>a<\/i><sup>2<\/sup>\u00a0+\u00a0<i>b<\/i><sup>2<\/sup>\u00a0=\u00a0<i>c<\/i><sup>2<\/sup> are all the same colour. For example, for the Pythagorean triple 3, 4 and 5, if 3 and 5 were coloured blue, 4 would have to be red.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Source: <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/news\/two-hundred-terabyte-maths-proof-is-largest-ever-1.19990\">Two-hundred-terabyte maths proof is largest ever<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>There are more than 10<sup>2,300<\/sup> ways to colour the integers up to 7,825, but the researchers took advantage of symmetries and several techniques from number theory to reduce the total number of possibilities that the computer had to check to just under 1 trillion. It took the team about 2 days running 800 processors in parallel on the University of Texas\u2019s Stampede supercomputer to zip through all the possibilities. The researchers then verified the proof using another computer program.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The puzzle that required the 200-terabyte proof, called the Boolean Pythagorean triples problem, has eluded mathematicians for decades. In the 1980s, Graham offered a prize of US$100 for anyone who could solve it. (He duly presented the cheque to one &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/bucktownbell.com\/?p=16292\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[737],"tags":[670,180,332,447],"class_list":["post-16292","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-stem","tag-algorithms","tag-math","tag-parallel-processing","tag-supercomputers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bucktownbell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16292","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bucktownbell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bucktownbell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bucktownbell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bucktownbell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16292"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/bucktownbell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16292\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16293,"href":"http:\/\/bucktownbell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16292\/revisions\/16293"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bucktownbell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16292"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bucktownbell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16292"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bucktownbell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16292"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}