A team of scientists has solved a mathematical puzzle in just 32 years. So it turns out that the ninth Dedekind number has 42 digits.
Mathematicians from the University of Paderborn have solved a mathematical problem that no one has solved for more than 200 years. Interesting Engineering writes about it.
Scientists succeeded thanks to the supercomputer Noctua 2. So, they finally discovered the ninth Dedekind number.
“Dedekind numbers were first discovered in the 19th century by Richard Dedekind and have interested mathematicians ever since. Dedekind numbers are a rapidly growing set of integers. They are closely related to the monotonic functions, which are mathematical functions that take a binary input ( 0 or 1) and produce binary raw data,” writes Wikipedia.
By the way, the eighth Dedekind number was discovered in 1991 using the most powerful computer of the time. We are talking about Cray 2.
Since then, mathematicians have been trying to calculate the ninth Dedekind number on a supercomputer. But this is possible only after 32 years.
“Due to the computational complexity of calculating the ninth Dedekind number, we used a P-factor formula that allowed the team to calculate the ninth number by grand sum instead of counting each term of the series. We created an application -specific hardware accelerators using Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) to improve computational efficiency”, the researchers said.
So, within five months, the ninth Dedekind number was finally found – 286386577668298411128469151667598498812366.
Remember that early scientists said that learning math stimulates young people’s cognitive development.
Source: korrespondent
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