Works by Archimedes | Diophantine equations | Large integers
Archimedes's cattle problem
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 44 lines, in the Herzog August Library in Wolfenbüttel, Germany in 1773. 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 (1845–1916), headmaster of the Gymnasium zum Heiligen Kreuz (Gymnasium of the Holy Cross) in Dresden, Germany. Using logarithmic tables, he calculated the first digits of the smallest solution, showing that it is about cattle, far more than could fit in the observable universe. The decimal form is too long for humans to calculate exactly, but multiple-precision arithmetic packages on computers can write it out explicitly. (Wikipedia).
