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Anime fans stumbled upon a mathematical proof

When a fan of a cult anime series wanted to watch its episodes in every possible order, they asked a question that had perplexed combinatorial mathematicians for years

In 2011 an anonymous poster on the now infamously controversial image board 4chan posed a mathematical puzzle about the cult classic anime series The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. Houston had just learned that Australian science fiction author Greg Egan had found a new maximum length for the shortest superpermutations, expressed as: But when Houston started learning more about this result, he realized that the minimum length of a superpermutation had been given a new value by an anonymous anime fandom user (he didn’t know about the origins on 4chan at that time).

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