Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 July 2005
J.W.S. Cassels gave a solution to the problem of determining all instances of the sum of three consecutive cubes being a square. This amounts to finding all integer solutions to the Diophantine equation $y^2=3x(x^2+2)$. We describe an alternative approach to solving not only this equation, but any equation of the type $y^2=nx(x^2+2)$, with $n$ a natural number. Moreover, we provide an explicit upper bound for the number of solutions of such Diophantine equations. The method we present uses the ingenious work of Wilhelm Ljunggren, and a recent improvement by the authors.