In the 1980s, Ron Graham asked whether every red/blue coloring of the positive integers contains a monochromatic Pythagorean triple and offered a $100 prize for the answer. The bounty was claimed in 2016 by Heule, Kullmann, and Marek, who showed that every such coloring of [1,7825] has a monochromatic triple. Their proof used SAT solvers and took over 50,000 CPU hours to produce and verify. In this talk we will present an elementary solution to Graham’s problem that requires neither deep analytic arguments nor extensive computation.
Welcome William J. Wesley, a new members of the IBS Discrete Mathematics Group
The IBS Discrete Mathematics Group welcomes Dr. William J. Wesley, a new research fellow at the IBS Discrete Mathematics Group, starting September 1, 2026.
He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Davis under the supervision of Prof. Jesús A. De Loera. Until recently, he was an SEW Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of California, San Diego. His research is focused primarily on computational Ramsey theory, and he is more broadly interested in combinatorics, algebra, and optimization.