Paris: An Anglo-American trio presented the prize-winning solution to a 35-year old maths problem on Friday, but verifying it may be a problem in itself: reading it would take 10 billion years.
“Boolean Pythagorean Triples” is not a shameful contagious disease, but a long-unsolved enigma within a field called Ramsey Theory.

It was such a brain-teaser that nearly 30 years ago fabled American mathematician Roland Graham offered a cash prize to anyone who could solve it.

It was only $100, but still.

The self-declared winners – Marijn Heule, Oliver Kullmann and Victor Marek, of the universities of Texas, Swansea and Kentucky, respectively unveiled their proof at the international SAT 2016 conference in Bordeaux, France.

By their own account, they cracked the puzzle “using Cube-and-Conquer, a hybrid satisfiability testing (SAT) method for hard problems.”