An anonymous post on 4chan has led to a discovery about the perplexing superpermutation problem, or how long a list of any given series of numbers must be such that it can include every possible order of that series. Australian science fiction author Greg Egan used the 4chan post to establish a new upper bound for a series of any length, with mathematicians such as Jay Pantone of Marquette University in Milwaukee scrambling to verify the unpublished 2011 lower bound. The breakthrough means Haruhi fans can watch all possible series permutations of season one in just 93,924,230,411 episodes.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/sci-fi-writer-greg-egan-and-anonymous-math-whiz-advance-permutation-problem-20181105/