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An elliptic curve is generally an order 3 (cubic) equation. The animation below shows the Thompson cubic, but that's too hard for a general puzzle. Instead, many good problems are in cubic numbers: 1^3 = 1, 2^3 = 8, 3^3 = 27, leading to the sequence 1, 8, 27, 64, 125, 216, 343, 512, 729, 1000, 1331, 1728, 2197, 2744... The negative cubes start -1, -8, -27, ...
Easy: Find a non-zero number expressible as a sum of two positive cubes in two different ways.
Moderate: Find a non-zero number expressible as a sum of two cubes in three different ways.
Too hard: Find four different non-zero numbers so that the sum of any pair is a cubic number.
ThompsonCubic
Wolfram SpikeyPuzzles provided by Wolfram Research, Makers of Mathematica