On the smallest open Diophantine equations

Abstract

This paper reports on the current status of the project in which we order all polynomial Diophantine equations by an appropriate version of "size", and then solve the equations in that order. We list the "smallest" equations that are currently open, both unrestricted and in various families, like the smallest open symmetric, 2-variable or 3-monomial equations. All the equations we discuss are amazingly simple to write down but some of them seem to be very difficult to solve.