TITLE: $x^5 + y^2 = z^3$
QUESTION [14 upvotes]: While waiting for my döner at lunch the other day, I noticed my order number was $343 = 7^3$ (surely not the total for that day), which reminded me of how $3^5 = 243$, so that $$7^3 = 3^5 + 100 = 3^5 + 10^2.$$
Naturally, I started wondering about nontrivial integer solutions to $$x^5 + y^2 = z^3 \tag{*}$$
("nontrivial" meaning $xyz \ne 0$). I did not make much progress, though apparently there are infinitely many solutions: this was Problem 1 on the 1991 Canadian Mathematical Olympiad. The official solutions (at the bottom of this page) only go back to 1994. A cheap answer is given by taking $x = 2^{2k}$ and $y = 2^{5k}$ so that the l.h.s. is $2^{10k + 1}$. This is a cube iff $10k + 1 \equiv 0 \,(3)$ i.e. $k \equiv 2\,(3)$ thus giving an arithmetic progression's worth of solutions, starting with $$(x, y, z) = (16, 1024, 128)$$ corresponding to $k = 2$ 
and $$(x, y, z) = (1024, 33554432, 131072)$$
coming from $k = 5$.
What else is known about the equation $(*)$? In particular, are there infinitely many solutions with $x$, $y$, $z$ relatively prime? The one that caught my attention was $(x, y, z) = (3, 10, 7)$. Another one is $(-1, 3, 2)$ because $-1 + 9 = 8$. By Catalan's conjecture (now a theorem), this is the only solution with $x = \pm 1$ or $y = \pm 1$ or $z = 1$. Are there any solutions with $z = -1$? In this case, $(*)$ reduces to $x^5 + y^2 = -1$ and Mihăilescu's theorem does not apply.
Update. This question was essentially already asked here, since the equation $a^2 + b^3 = c^5$ is equivalent to  $(-c)^5 + a^2 = (-b)^3$.

REPLY [9 votes]: There is a beautiful connection between $a^5+b^3=c^2$ and the icosahedron. Consider the unscaled icosahedral equation,
$$\color{blue}{12^3u v(u^2 + 11 u v - v^2)^5}+(u^4 - 228 u^3 v + 494 u^2 v^2 + 228 u v^3 + v^4)^3  = (u^6 + 522 u^5 v - 10005 u^4 v^2 - 10005 u^2 v^4 - 522 u v^5 + v^6)^2\tag1$$
By scaling $u=12x^5$ and $v=12y^5$ (or various combinations thereof like $u=12^2x^5$, etc), we then get a relation of form,
$$12^5a^5+b^3=c^2$$