An amateur mathematician just partially solved a problem that has vexed mathematicians since 1950.
Aubrey de Grey — a biologist better known for trying to radically extend human life and for predicting that the first person to live to be 1,000 years old has already been born — has published a paper on the preprint server arXiv that narrows down the answer to the 68-year-old Hadwiger-Nelson problem. Mathematicians had known for years that the answer to this question (which we'll get to in a second) was either 4, 5, 6 or 7. De Grey, in his paper, showed that it definitely isn't 4. That leaves just 5, 6 or 7. [The 9 Most Massive Numbers in Existence]
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