Recreating World's Shortest Math Paper with Rust and WASM
In 1769, Euler made his "sum of powers" conjecture. In 1966, L. J. Lander and T. R. Parkin disproved the conjecture with a counterexample they found using a CDC 6600 mainframe computer. Their paper famously contained just two sentences.
In 2022, your browser running on your phone can find their counterexample and additional counterexamples in about 2 seconds.
Try it yourself at https://carlkcarlk.github.io/shortestpaper/. The page uses Rust and WASM. (I'd love help making it better. Please, see below.)
I'd love to make this better and would embrace suggestions, collaborations, and/or pull requests.
Some things I'd love to do, but can't figure out how to do:
- Show "working" while it is working (or, even better, show a progress bar)
- Run multithreaded with Rayon. (The code is ready, but WASM won't run with it.)
- Catch panics in the Rust/WASM. Currently, any problems are silently ignored by the web page. For example, if I try to use Rayon, it apparently fails, but there is no error or message.
- Better formatting of the web page to mimic the 1966 paper. (My knowledge of HTML/CSS is 20 years out of date).
- anything else you can suggest
The project is open source on Github at https://github.com/CarlKCarlK/shortestpaper.
\- Carl