Mathematicians / folks knowledgeable on the subject - do you think Fermat had an error in his (lost) proof? Or that there exists a solution that perhaps is more straightforward than Wiles's?
My understanding is that Wiles had to use a ton of math (and invent some new math?) that had not yet been invented in Fermat's time.
kadoban 31 minutes ago [-]
Consensus is that there's no way he had a correct, general proof.
My personal guess is he figured out later that his proof was broken or limited and never got around to fixing it.
odyssey7 5 minutes ago [-]
We haven’t yet reached the era in which we’re allowed to know about the technique. The simple, elegant proof will become available to us when the time is right.
jerkstate 40 minutes ago [-]
I don't know that much about math but I've read that one possibility is he had found a valid proof for n=4 and assumed that it generalized. Hopefully someone else who knows more about the subject chimes in!
BinRoo 3 days ago [-]
Aside: the AI summary of this attributes the wrong person. This is Andrew Wiles.
OJFord 1 hours ago [-]
Do you mean Atish Joygobin, for the background music?
kurthr 3 hours ago [-]
Who solved FLT.
alex1138 2 hours ago [-]
I've only skimmed it but Simon Singh's book on it seems reasonably accessible to non-experts
One interesting thing of FLT is Wiles is on record as saying it opened the door (I think. This is from memory) to Langlands Program, a series of mathematical connections
Harder problems of course exist, Riemann Hypothesis et al but FLT still took hundreds of years to solve
hingler36 2 hours ago [-]
I read Singh's book a few years ago, I really enjoyed it and left with a basic understanding of the underlying math
QuesnayJr 2 hours ago [-]
You remember correctly. His result is a special case of Langlands.
pseudohadamard 2 days ago [-]
Just to check, this video isn't NSFW is it?
convolutedsoup 2 hours ago [-]
This comment left me so bewildered that I wanted to create a hackernews account just to comment this.
esafak 1 hours ago [-]
It might be a joke in reference to the video's title, "I loved every minute of it, however hard it had been".
jackdoe 2 days ago [-]
depends, I would say it is not safe for work as it makes you question what are you doing there :)
its phenomenology porn
ThrowawayTestr 2 hours ago [-]
YouTube generally doesn't allow that
Rendered at 00:17:56 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Mathematicians / folks knowledgeable on the subject - do you think Fermat had an error in his (lost) proof? Or that there exists a solution that perhaps is more straightforward than Wiles's?
My understanding is that Wiles had to use a ton of math (and invent some new math?) that had not yet been invented in Fermat's time.
My personal guess is he figured out later that his proof was broken or limited and never got around to fixing it.
One interesting thing of FLT is Wiles is on record as saying it opened the door (I think. This is from memory) to Langlands Program, a series of mathematical connections
Harder problems of course exist, Riemann Hypothesis et al but FLT still took hundreds of years to solve
its phenomenology porn