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Comment by heinrichf | Hacker News Reader

A beautiful and touching documentary about Fermat's last theorem, Wiles, and the other mathematicians involved in its proof: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x223gx8

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I watched this documentary during a summer afternoon and I was left with tears in my eyes. It was touching and inspiring. A lot of hard work went into proving this. It made me appreciate mathematics in a much more deep sense.

That was beautiful. It makes you wonder whether Fermat really had a proof, and if he did, why no one has replicated it using more rudimentary mathematics? If a mathematician could explain that I would be thankful.

IANAM, but honestly, the note he left sounds like a troll/trap to me. If he truly found an elegant proof, wouldn't he have published it?

OTOH the history of mathematics seems to include the development of notation to hide complexity, so FLT can be written as A = sB

He most likely did not and thought that his work in low dimensions would easily scale up to higher dimensions, unaware of the monsters that lurk there.

He had the proof for the power of 2, and when he wrote his line he might have had the proof for powers of 3 in mind (which he didnt write down) and thought that that one would generalize for all n. Which turned out to be true, but for completely different reasons.

https://math.stackexchange.com/a/324764/243949

I think you must mean for the powers of 3 and 4. It's not true for the power of 2!

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