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Comment by vanderZwan | Hacker News Reader

> But when I got back to my office in the morning, the cleaning lady had wiped the blackboard clean.

Didn't something that happen to the notes of a very famous mathematician as well? That they were burned by the person cleaning up his belongings after he died?

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You might be thinking of Riemann, who died in Italy leaving some unpublished notes in Göttingen that were thrown away by his housekeeper

Perhaps you're thinking of Fermat[0], who famously remarked "I have discovered a truly remarkable proof of this theorem which this margin is too small to contain.", and promptly proceeded to take the solution with him to the other side.

I doubt anyone burned his manuscripts however, but I seem to recall an article where they mentioned that everyone searched for the solution (or for his approach) in every one of his notebooks, but couldn't find it.

[0] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Pierre_de_Fermat

Isn't the accepted version of this that Fermat thought he had an elegant solution, but had actually made some simple logical error in his reasoning? And Andrew Wiles' solution is certainly not simple. However it is very seductive to imagine that Fermat was correct, and it's just that no-one since has had the insight to rediscover it.

Very seductive but highly unrealistic. Wiles' proof required math techniques undiscovered at the time Fermat made this famous statement.

Just because our proof is complicated does not mean Fermat's proof couldn't have been simple, as no exhaustive search of all possible short proofs has ever been carried out. Vanishingly unlikely yes, but not proven false, and after all it is exceedingly romantic. ;)

> and after all it is exceedingly romantic.

Agree on that part. (:

No I think it was more someone like Riemann, Abel or Gauss, but I can't find any proof of this being true for any of them.

Probably one of those apocryphal stories that died when the internet came along (I remember first hearing of this two decades ago).

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