Also, here's a writeup by one of the authors explaining the history and context behind this paper: <a href="http://www.wfnmc.org/mc20101.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.wfnmc.org/mc20101.pdf</a><p>Apparently the question posed in the title of the paper is still an open question, although both authors conjecture that the answer is "no".<p>There's previous discussion on HN (2015) but I hadn't seen it before: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10622660" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10622660</a><p>I found out about this through this stack exchange answer that also lists other candidates for "shortest math paper ever" by various metrics: <a href="https://hsm.stackexchange.com/a/14612/18150" rel="nofollow">https://hsm.stackexchange.com/a/14612/18150</a>