Archimedes's cattle problem
Mathematical problem in number theory / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Dear Wikiwand AI, let's keep it short by simply answering these key questions:
Can you list the top facts and stats about Archimedes's cattle problem?
Summarize this article for a 10 year old
Archimedes's cattle problem (or the problema bovinum or problema Archimedis) is a problem in Diophantine analysis, the study of polynomial equations with integer solutions. Attributed to Archimedes, the problem involves computing the number of cattle in a herd of the sun god from a given set of restrictions. The problem was discovered by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in a Greek manuscript containing a poem of forty-four lines, in the Herzog August Library in Wolfenbüttel, Germany in 1773.[1]
The problem remained unsolved for a number of years, due partly to the difficulty of computing the huge numbers involved in the solution. The general solution was found in 1880 by Carl Ernst August Amthor [de] (1845–1916), headmaster of the Gymnasium zum Heiligen Kreuz (Gymnasium of the Holy Cross) in Dresden, Germany.[2][3][4] Using logarithmic tables, he calculated the first digits of the smallest solution, showing that it is about 7.76×10206544 cattle, far more than could fit in the observable universe.[5] The decimal form is too long for humans to calculate exactly, but multiple-precision arithmetic packages on computers can write it out explicitly.