Is There a Perfect Cuboid? // 129

It's true that late in Nobel's life, Mittag-Leffler was chosen to negotiate with him about leaving to the Stockholm Hogskola ¨ (which later became the University) a significant amount of money in his will, and this attempt eventually failed ­ but presumably Mittag-Leffler wouldn't have been chosen if he'd already offended Nobel. In any case, Mittag-Leffler wasn't likely to win a mathematical Nobel if one existed ­ there were plenty of more prominent mathematicians around. So it seems more likely that it simply never occurred to Nobel to award a prize for mathematics, or that he considered the idea and rejected it, or that he didn't want to spend even more cash.

Despite this, several mathematicians and mathematical physicists have won the prize for work in other areas ­ physics, chemistry, physiology/medicine, even literature. They have also won the `Nobel' in economics ­ the Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, established by the Sveriges Riksbank

........................................... in 1968.

Is There a Perfect Cuboid? It is easy to find rectangles whose sides and diagonals are whole numbers ­ this is the hoary old problem of Pythagorean triangles, and it has been known since antiquity how to find all of them (page 58). Using the classical recipe, it is not too hard to find a cuboid ­ a box with rectangular sides ­ such that its sides, and the diagonals of all its faces, are whole numbers. The first set of values given below achieves this. But what no one has yet been able to find is a perfect cuboid ­ one in which the `long diagonal' between opposite corners of the cuboid is also a whole number.

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