5 ms·
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
by kadoban 2mo 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 2mo agoWe haven’t yet reached the era in which we’re allowed to know about the technique. The simple, intuitive proof will become available to us when the time is right.
- hn_throwaway_99 2mo agoQuite literally, WTF is that supposed to mean?
- kjs3 2mo agoIt's the internet. Don't feed the trolls. Or the loons.
- lmntryflt 2mo ago[dead]
- applfanboysbgon 2mo agoThe funny thing is that whether or not he had a proof, it was only definitively proved because he claimed he had a proof, so in a roundabout sense, he's still responsible for the theorem being proved. It's kind of crazy to think about your words carrying so much weight that somebody from hundreds of years in the future will dedicate (a significant portion of) their life to them.
- hn_throwaway_99 2mo ago> he's still responsible for the theorem being proved. I think you have an odd definition of "responsible". Many (most?) theorems start out as conjectures, and I would strongly disagree that just because someone first formulated a problem that they're "responsible" for the eventual solution.
- applfanboysbgon 2mo agoIt's not just that he formulated the problem, though. It was specifically the fact that he claimed he had a proof which led to the proof, and it was only because people credibly believed he had one that they spent so much effort trying to (supposedly, re-)discover it.
- hn_throwaway_99 2mo ago> and it was only because people credibly believed he had one that they spent so much effort trying to (supposedly, re-)discover it. That's not true. Even early on, most mathematicians doubted he had a proof. But I'd check out the history of the problem as described on Wikipedia. There was considerable research into the problem before Fermat, and general research into Diophantine equations had gone on for over a thousand years before Fermat. I have no doubt there would have been significant interest into solving the problem even if Fermat had never written his "I have a proof but it's too big to fit in the margin" note.
- duskwuff 2mo agoI have to agree. Even if it hadn't been designated as Fermat's Last Theorem, the problem would likely have ended up in some comparable list of interesting conjectures (e.g. Hilbert's problems, the Erdős problems, the Millennium Prize problems, etc).
- raverbashing 2mo agoI think he had a hunch, and maybe in his mathematic mind he got to the right answer by the wrong path But yes had him not pointed it out maybe it would have been relegated to a mathematical curiosity or something I think there's a deeper (but simpler) reason for it, besides the way Wiles proved it