Diophantine equations have been in the news lately.

This because, on September 6th 2019 a team lead

by researchers at the University of Bristol and MIT announced that they had discovered the final
solution to the so-called “sums of three cubes” problem, which asks for integer solutions to the equation
x³ + y³ + z³ = k for values of k between 1 and 100. Since its formulation in 1954 at the University of
Cambridge, up until 2016, every solution had been found except two, for k=33 and k=42. In March of
this year, mathematician Andrew R. Booker in a paper published on arXiv.org announced that he had
found the correct solution for k=33 using weeks of computation time on Bristol’s supercomputer. His
solution, presented in the paper “Cracking the problem with 33” is:

Then, just a week or so ago, again the news broke: k=42 had been discovered, again by Booker along
with another Andrew, Andrew Sutherland at MIT, using the crowd-sourced so-called Charity Engine.
Their answer is:

For values of k between 1 and 1000, solutions still remain to be found for the integers 114, 165, 390,
579, 627, 633, 732, 906, 921 and 975.

Diophantine equations

The sums of three cubes problem is an example of a problem asking for solutions to a Diophantine
equation, which may be defined as:

Definition

A Diophantine equation is an algebraic equation with several unknowns and integer coefficients.

That is, Diophantine equations are equations featuring several unknown variables (x,y, z, ..) whose
solutions (=0) only appear when the coefficients of the equation (a, b, c, …) are integers ( … ,-2, -1, 0, 1,
2, … ).

The Linear Diophantine Equation

A linear Diophantine equation is an equation of the first-degree whose solutions are restricted to
integers. The prototypical linear Diophantine equation is:

where a, b and c are integer coefficients and x and y are variables. Typical linear Diophantine problems
hence involve whole amounts, such as e.g (Brilliant.org, 2019):

How many ways are there to make $2.00 from only nickels and quarters?

The solutions to the problem are found by assigning variables to the number of nickels (x) and the
number of quarters (y). We know that $2 is 200 cents (c), and that a nickel is worth 5 cents (a) and a
quarter 25 cents (b). Thus, we easily arrive at the equation specifying the number of ways in which we
can have $2.00 in nickels and quarters:
Now, because this is a single equation with two unknowns, we cannot solve for one variable at a time
(as one could do with a typical system of linear equations). Instead, for the linear case, we can use the
following theorem:

Linear Diophantine equations have integer solutions if and only if c is a multiple of the greatest common
divisor of a and b.

If integers (x, y) constitute a solution to the linear Diophantine equation for given a, b and c, then the
other solutions have the form (x + kv, y - ku) where k is an arbitrary integer and u and v are the quotients
of a and b (respectively) by the greatest common divisors of a and b.

The greatest common divisor (GCD) of two or more integers, which are not all zero, is the largest
positive integer that divides each of the integers. For our example above, we can begin by factoring out
the common divisor 5, obtaining:

The greatest common divisor of a and b, 1 and 5, is 1. Any non-negative c is a multiple of 1. There are
nine such multiples of 5 which are less than or equal to 40. They are 0, 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35, 40.
Therefore, there are nine ways to make $2.00 from nickels and quarters. They are:

(0, 8), (5, 7), (10, 6), (15, 5), (20, 4), (25, 3), (30, 2), (35, 1) og (40, 0).

The above process is a simple version of what is called Diophantine analysis, the process required for
finding solutions to Diophantine equations. The questions typically asked during such analyses are:

Are there any solutions?

Are there any solutions beyond some that are easily found by inspection?

Are there finitely or infinitely many solutions?

Can all solutions be found, in theory?

Can one in practice compute a full list of solutions?

Popular techniques used to solve Diophantine equations include factor decomposition, bounding by
inequalities, parametrization, modular arithmetic, induction, Fermat’s infinite descent, reduction to
Pell’s and continued fractions, positional numeral systems and elliptic curves (Wikiversity, 2019).