Solving Fermat: Andrew Wiles
pbs.org
pbs.org
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermat%27s_Last_Theorem_(book) by Simon Singh
But I am not sure if the book covers the mistake and later correction. It has been more than a decade since I read the book (and became a fan of the author).
One of the best books I’ve ever read.
Personally, I liked the design when zoomed in when combined with the rest of the page design. It reminds me of the 90s (Wired magazine, etc.). "Updated November 2000". That explains it.
But agreed, that lime green is horrendous.
Table-based layout, font tags, map/area tags. Only thing missing is an unnecessarily imported jQuery.
With respect to FLT, my hopes have modestly increased that a truly marvelous demonstration of this proposition does in fact exist, that Fermat actually had it, and that it may someday be recovered!
edit: some emphasis on modest. But let me be romantic here!
The efficient markets hypothesis says the market prices incorporate all available information and there's no such thing as a cheap stock, so there's no easy money to be made by trading.
The math equivalent is presumably that all easy problems have been solved and all open problems should be very very hard. This has turned out not to be the case as LLMs have found simple counterexamples to long held conjectures.
Strictly speaking, if you constructively prove P=NP and the solver has reasonable time complexity, e.g. quadratic, it could make you incredibly rich. If you don't attract the wrong kind of attention from the world's intelligence agencies first...
> That's not-nothing but can't hold a candle to the potential fortunes of the market.
a market is where things are sold and bought. there are lots of markets which aren't as well capitalized as financial markets - your local farmer's market doesn't "hold a candle to the potential fortunes of the market" but it's still a market (and presumably the efficient market hypothesis still applies).
The market for solving math problems is tiny compared to selling/ running algos for trading. You solve a pure math problem you might get accolades from some professors.
> AW: I don't believe Fermat had a proof. I think he fooled himself into thinking he had a proof. But what has made this problem special for amateurs is that there's a tiny possibility that there does exist an elegant 17th-century proof.
Yes, it's generally accepted that Fermat didn't in fact have a proof, with the tools available to him at the time. But wouldn't it be cool to send some AI on this chase and see what comes back? Is anyone attempting this?
In 1847 Gabriel Lami presented a claimed (simple) general proof to the French Academy of Sciences, only for the flawed assumption in it to be pointed out immediately at the end of his presentation! This may have been the same proof that Fermat had in mind.
Posting because he's retiring this year?
(the site is : "An ongoing multi-author open source project to formalise a proof of Fermat's Last Theorem in the Lean theorem prover.")
Wiles' proof is 129 pages long, and builds on results that require a vast amount of infrastructure to define.
It's going to take dozens of person-years.
Higher mathematics is just a different world to those of us who haven't even a clue how that world functions.