Euler’s Sum Of Powers Conjecture
April 17, 2015
Fermat’s Last Theorem, which dates to the seventeenth century states that there are no solutions in integers to the equation xn + yn = zn for n > 2; the Theorem was finally proved a few years ago by Andres Wiles. In the eighteenth century, Euler conjectured that for any n > 2, it would take at least n terms of the form xin to sum to an n th power. That conjecture held until the age of computers, in 1967, when Lander and Parkin found the counter-example 275 + 845 + 1105 + 1335 = 1445.
Your task is to write a program that finds counter-examples to Euler’s Conjecture. When you are finished, you are welcome to read or run a suggested solution, or to post your own solution or discuss the exercise in the comments below.
Programming Praxis 