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I remember trying to "prove" Fermat's last theorem while at school (I was around 16 at the time and obviously somewhat naive). The equation itself looked so sim
by osrec 9y ago
I remember trying to "prove" Fermat's last theorem while at school (I was around 16 at the time and obviously somewhat naive). The equation itself looked so simple that I was convinced a proof would be equally as concise. After a few failed attempts, I googled for solutions and stumbled up on Andrew Wiles' proof. I was dumbfounded at its complexity! There is still a part of me that hopes/believes that there exists some undiscovered crafty little mathematical trick that can distill this monster proof into something simple!
- amelius 9y agoIf that crafty little trick is really that little, perhaps we could try to find it by brute forcing it on a computer (symbolically, using a proof system) (?)
- eli_gottlieb 9y agoNumber theory often involves theorems that are simple to state and extraordinarily difficult to prove. It's one of the branches of maths that comes closest to hard problems in computational complexity and proof theory (at least, as I understand the matter).