In 1973, Saharon Shelah[?] showed that from the standard ZFC axiom system, the statement can be neither proven nor disproven.
This result was completely unexpected. While the existence of undecidable statements had been known since Gödel's incompleteness theorem of 1931, previous examples of undecidable statements (such as the Continuum hypothesis) had been confined to the realm of set theory. The Whitehead problem was the first purely algebraic problem that was shown to be undecidable.
The Whitehead problem is undecidable even if one assumes the Continuum hypothesis, as shown by Shelah in 1980.
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