The Oldest Unsolved Problem in Math

>walks up to blackboard >multiplies 2 numbers >walks away >round of applause Frank Nelson Cole was unfathomably based

Not me watching thinking I’m gonna try to solve this while eating hot cheetos

Normal people would say “There’s no way” Some other people would say “The chance is low, but never zero” And then comes the mathematician: “The chance is never zero, but how low is it?”

I'd like to thank you for making me aware of GIMPS. I'm donating some of my cpu power overnight now.

13:25 "But Euler wasn't finished yet." I think this sentence appears in most histories of mathematical concepts.

When Euler says "it's most difficult", it's gotta be impossible.

i'm becoming more respectful to my teachers, when i realize i can now understand and enjoy these kind of videos.. even 15 years later after the school..

Your videos are always so crisp, clean, and educational

Watching a math related video strictly out of curiosity and having your general math professor Bill Dunham from 25 years ago pop up is a surprise…and finding out he’s now a well respected mathematics historian and not just some guy who endlessly suffered non-math students struggles with train problems is absolutely fantastic. Go Mules!

4:03 "Euclid was actually thinking along similar lines" Euclid: calculates perfect numbers with actual lines

I'm an English major, and I just subscribed to Veritasium because I enjoyed this so much. Thank you! I can't wait to chase down every last video!

This channel is absolutely THE BEST science channel. Not only on YT but in general. I'm a primary school teacher from Poland and the amount of facts and curiosities I get from here and transfer into teaching physics, chemistry and even English is astonishing. Thank you.

I have a research project due tomorrow and I was really looking for something distracting. My procrastination thanks you.

There is something so bizarre about Euclid and Euler having a collaboration. If the history of mathematics was a book of fiction, I would call this a fan service 😂

I had a fun watch, definitely amazing to think about! I've been fascinated with numbers and problems since grade school and has been thinking about problems with patterns like this ever since. Not that I am any good at it nor am I sure when trying to come up with formulas based on these patterns. And sometimes, I tend to simplify these kind of problems based on what they look at. With that, I also think there is no odd perfect number for the fact that these perfect numbers we currently have all have the factor "2" which obviously makes it divisible by 2.

Congrats on making such a topic so enjoyable and interesting throughout the whole video. Wow!

As a physics undergrad. I’ve come to realize that Euler is a Titan alongside Einstein and Newton. Every single bit of modern physics has Euler to thank for providing the mathematical Tools to construct a vivid picture of the universe and its underlying principles. Absolute legend.

28 years later you single handedly taught me how formulas are made!!!!

The calculation itself is the application. In IT we use prime95 to stress test a machine, for example for overclocking or checking if the hardware is faulty.

One big application of Mersenne primes, that came from studying perfect numbers, is a good random number generator. RNGs had been historically very bad, until the introduction of Mersenne Twister in 1997, which uses a property of Mersenne primes to prove a good randomness. The most popular version uses a Mersenne prime 2^19937 - 1 for example, hence the name MT19937. There exist much more performant RNGs than Mersenne Twister now, but Mersenne Twister is still widely used thanks to its initial impact.