42 T-Shirt

The number 42 is especially significant to fans of science fiction novelist Douglas Adams’ “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” because that number is the answer given by a supercomputer to “the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.” Booker also wanted to know the answer to 42. That is, are there three cubes whose sum is 42? This sum of three cubes puzzle, first set in 1954 at the University of Cambridge and known as the Diophantine Equation x3+y3+z3=k, challenged mathematicians to find solutions for numbers 1-100. With smaller numbers, this type of equation is easier to solve: for example, 29 could be written as 33 + 13 + 13, while 32 is unsolvable.