It's well-known that every natural number can be written as a sum of 4 squares of integers.


Has there been any recent progress about the similar problem for the cubes, 4-th powers and so on? I believe this was proven to be representable using some N — that depends on the power — and what's the story about it?



Sums of cubes and more
Arguably, the problem "what is the least g=g(k) such that *every* integer can be written as the sum of g k-th powers" is less interesting than the version that ignores the random stuff that's happening with a finite number of special cases. 


Namely, the "real" question should be "what is the least G=G(k) such that for some N, every integer greater than N can be represented as the sum of G k-th powers". 


For example, every number is the sum of 19 4th powers, but every number greater than 13,792 is actually the sum of just 16 4th powers. The "16" was known for quite some time; the verification that 13,792 is the last offender is quite recent (I found the value on Wikipedia, btw).


Evaluating G(k) is harder than evaluating g(k), and most of the actual values are still not known. I don't think there was tremendous recent progress on this front, although there certainly is progress on things like bounds, number of representations, etc. 


You should look at Wooley's survey [here](http://www.maths.bris.ac.uk/~matdw/2002%20wps.pdf) (I haven't read it yet). 


