from Hacker News

Julia Robinson helped define the limits of mathematical knowledge (2019)

by rfreytag on 1/13/23, 12:53 PM with 18 comments

• by hackandthink on 1/14/23, 1:31 PM

  A nice article with a nice equation:

  42 = -80538738812075974^3 + 80435758145817515^3 + 12602123297335631^3

  Douglas Adams would rejoice. (checked it in bc)

  Some Background from Wikipedia:

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diophantine_set#Matiyasevich's...

  "Hilbert's tenth problem asks for a general algorithm deciding the solvability of Diophantine equations. The conjunction of Matiyasevich's result with the fact that most recursively enumerable languages are not decidable implies that a solution to Hilbert's tenth problem is impossible."

• by Frummy on 1/14/23, 6:11 PM

  Interesting to learn she was the little sister of Constance Reid, who wrote a fantastic biography of Hilbert which is on my desk right now.

• by jimhefferon on 1/14/23, 3:15 PM

  I was sorry to read that recently Martin Davis passed. Along with JR, another giant.

• by moloch-hai on 1/14/23, 10:45 PM

  I would have liked for the story to have noted, at least in passing, that 3³+4³+5³ = 6³.

  (I found this in the brilliantly mad "The celestial inspirations for Giza, Stonehenge and Washington D.C." by Robin Spivey:

  https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Robin-Spivey-2/publicat...

  Along with that, the Great Pyramid's latitude in degrees matches, to 6 digits, the speed of light in m/s divided by 10000; the King's chamber is precisely 5π/3 and also 2φ² meters wide; and that latitude in radians is π/6. Suffice to say that numerical coincidences everywhere are more the norm than the exception.)