492 Cubed is Sum of 3 Positive Cubes in 13 Ways/Historical Note
Historical Note on 492 Cubed is Sum of 3 Positive Cubes in 13 Ways
The question was asked in American Mathematical Monthly of January $1957$ for a (positive) integer less than $1000$ whose cube could be expressed as the sum of $3$ cubes in $5$ distinct ways.
A solution submitted by Leon Bankoff returned some $47$ such integers which have between $5$ and $9$ such expressions, but surprisingly $492$ was not among them.
$870$ had most such representations, that is, $9$.
Subsequent investigation unearthed several more.
By the time Joseph S. Madachy reported in his Mathematics on Vacation of $1966$, there were $2$ integers each with $10$ such representations (that is, $492$ and $870$), and one had $11$ (that is, $792$).
The representations for $492$ and $792$ were found by David A. Klarner, while the representations for $870$ were, as for the $1957$ investigation, attributed to Leon Bankoff.
A more recent investigation, using a computer program designed to test exhaustively all integers less than $1000$ has revealed that each of $492$, $792$ and $870$ has exactly $13$ such representations.
Sources
- 1957: C.M. Sandwick: Problems for Solution: $\text E 1249$ (Amer. Math. Monthly Vol. 64, no. 1: p. 43) www.jstor.org/stable/2309090
- 1957: Leon Bankoff: Solutions: $\text E 1249$ (Amer. Math. Monthly Vol. 64, no. 7: pp. 507 – 508) www.jstor.org/stable/2308471
- 1966: Joseph S. Madachy: Mathematics on Vacation ... (previous) ... (next): $6$: Number Recreations: Narcissistic Numbers: Miscellaneous