First, though, here’s what a cubic function looks like: Roughly speaking, a quadratic function, familiar from high school geometry, always goes up and then down (or down and then up). That’s it.

We share almost 99 percent of our DNA with our closest primate relatives, the chimpanzees. With this high degree of genetic ...

L. E. Dickson, Waring's Problem for Cubic Functions, Transactions of the American Mathematical Society, Vol. 36, No. 1 (Jan., 1934), pp. 1-12 ...