Cool Science

While I'm trying not to be too offended that CNN never wrote me back, I'll get over it with a little reading. One of my favorite books to flip through when I only have a few minutes and I want a fast brain-candy fix is Pappas' Joy of Mathematics and the equally good sequel. The page on perfect numbers (from the second book) explains that a perfect number is equal to the sum of all of its divisors. The first three perfect numbers are 6, 28 and 496. Pappas notes at that time that no odd perfect numbers had been identified, and that the question of their existence was a prominent unsolved problem.

That was fifteen years ago and I immediately jumped online to see what the current status is. A great authoritative source for math on the web is Eric Weissteins MathWorld and here's their page on perfect numbers. But in true form, he also has a page on the odd perfect number quest which is a really great page, and clearly this problem is still unsolved although mathematicians are chipping away at it from many angles. It has even inspired one person to try to organize an online site for it www.oddperfect.org. Would be fun to see somebody crack this one in either direction.