Nowadays the numerical facts above—not only the stated solutions, but the much
deeper claim that there are no other integral solutions—can be checked easily using
one of the many sophisticated computational packages available, such as MAGMA [3].
This is greatly to be celebrated, although the facility with which these calculations
can now be done risks obscuring the remarkable achievements made in Diophantine
analysis over the last forty years that have made this possible. It is not our intention to
survey these achievements (a detailed overview may be found in the lovely monograph
of Hindry and Silverman [17]), although some highlights on the theoretical side will
appear naturally