The world’s longest maths proof, written in May 2016, apparently takes up nearly 200 terabytes, beating the previous record of “only” 13 gigabytes.
200 terabytes of hard disk space would be tantamount to 3, 37, 920 copies of War and Peace by Russian polemic Leo Tolstoy. War and Peace is considered to be one of the longest literary works of fiction. One copy of the work has over 1,200 pages.
Image courtesy: Curiosity
The Boolean Pythagorean Triples problem was first posed in the 1980s by a California-based mathematician named Ronald Graham. The problem, which was solved and proved by Marijn J. H. Heule, Oliver Kullmann and Victor W. Marek, centers around the Pythagorean theorem: a^2 + b^2 = c^2.
There are specific sets of positive integers known as Pythagorean triples that can be inserted into the formula such as 32 + 42 = 52 and 52 + 122 = 132. Now imagine that every positive integer is either red or blue.
Graham asked whether it’s possible to colour all the integers either red or blue so that no set of Pythagorean triples were all the same color.
The solution in the record proof states that it is impossible!
