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I wonder if Andrew Wiles had taken a different approach when announcing he had solved Fermat's Last Theorem if he would have been considered a crank. I would im
by rdc12 7y ago
I wonder if Andrew Wiles had taken a different approach when announcing he had solved Fermat's Last Theorem if he would have been considered a crank. I would imagine that problem would have attracted nonsense solutions prior.
- anyfoo 7y agoThat's a big hypothetical, though. Andrew Wiles had been producing sensible mathematics in the community already, so there was no reason to suspect him of being a crank. Also, his proof did not emerge in a vacuum, he pursued approaches that were already known to be connected to FLT. As for FLT attracting nonsense solutions: Yes, plenty of them. It being such a simply stated problem, and immediately understandable to laypeople certainly exacerbated the problem.
- rdc12 7y agoFair point I have no familiarity with his earlier work, or even that there was suspicion of a connection, I did mean for my point to be a bit more general, just seemed like a reasonable example