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Listing Godel's incompleteness theorem is a bit unfair to mathematics. What about K-theory, Schemes, Motives, the Langland's programme, Agrawal-Kayal-Saxena on
by wbhart 15y ago
Listing Godel's incompleteness theorem is a bit unfair to mathematics. What about K-theory, Schemes, Motives, the Langland's programme, Agrawal-Kayal-Saxena on primes, Number Field Sieve, RSA and Elliptic Curve Crytography, all more recent. The list goes on, forever.... Proofs of Fermat's Last Theorem, the class number 1 conjecture, the Bieberbach conjecture, Catalan's conjecture, Serre's conjecture, Kepler conjecture, Poincare conjecture (Thurston's geometrization conjecture)....
- alister 15y agoI can't comment on all of those, but the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem is not in the same category of importance as the examples I gave. It's an accomplishment certainly, but not a theory or discovery of GREAT importance to the world. I do agree that public key cryptography is hugely important to the world, but it's technology rather than a discovery or a theory. (For the same reason, I didn't put the Web or Wikipedia on the list. It's very important, but it's technology.) Are you saying that some of the others on your list are (a) recent, and (b) in the same magnitude of importance as the Big Bang and Godel's incompleteness theorem?