The Shortest-Known Paper Published in a Serious Math Journal: Two Succinct Sentences

Euler’s con­jec­ture, a the­o­ry pro­posed by Leon­hard Euler in 1769, hung in there for 200 years. Then L.J. Lan­der and T.R. Parkin came along in 1966, and debunked the con­jec­ture in two swift sen­tences. Their arti­cle — which is now open access and can be down­loaded here — appeared in the Bul­letin of the Amer­i­can Math­e­mat­i­cal Soci­ety. If you’re won­der­ing what the con­jec­ture and its refu­ta­tion are all about, you might want to ask Cliff Pick­over, the author of 45 books on math and sci­ence. He brought this curi­ous doc­u­ment to the web back in 2015.

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