5 ms·
I remember when I was a student a friend of mine telling me this guy was giving a seminar and he'd just completed day one and everyone was really excited he was
by moomin 2y ago
I remember when I was a student a friend of mine telling me this guy was giving a seminar and he'd just completed day one and everyone was really excited he was going to prove FLT. Of course, the guy in question was Andrew Wiles. He then spent months patching up problems they found prior to publication and finally the whole thing got published. It was a hugely exciting thing when you were studying mathematics.
All of which is a long way of saying the line "the old-fashioned 1990s proof" makes me feel _really_ old.
- rateofclimb 2y agoAs a CS undergrad at Berkeley in the 90's I took an upper division math class in which we worked through the "old school" proof which was brand new and exciting then. Pretty much everyone else in the class was a math grad student. I don't think I understood more than 20% of the material! :)
- williamstein 2y agoI took that class with you! It was amazing. Here are my notes: https://wstein.org/books/ribet-stein/ https://wstein.org/books/ribet-stein/
- williamstein 2y agoAnd the professor who taught that course won a major prize today: Ribet to Receive 2025 AMS Steele Prize for Seminal Research - https://www.ams.org/news?news_id=7391&fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR2d6t_wCPkea3MpJZWld6JyhIKeMcTuivQEkZ3tTXeGBZM-32jxKrpq4_4_aem_7-o00iW2IS_Z8yS9JVhQRA https://www.ams.org/news?news_id=7391&fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CM...
- rateofclimb 2y agoThanks for sharing that! Very cool.
- dogboat 2y agoThere was a great documentary TV shown about this story.