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Comment by gohrt | Hacker News Reader

1. How can anyone who cares that much about the Simpsons write "David S. Cohen" multiple times?

2. Does anyone believe Fermat had a proof?

This article just smells sloppy.

3. When Itchy plays Scratchy's skeleton like a xylophone, he strikes the same rib twice in succession, yet he produces two clearly different tones.

1. You mean "David Samuel(S.) Cohen", one of the writers for The Simpsons and Futurama, who decided to make his name "David X. Cohen" (not his legal name) because the Writer's Guild does not accept duplicate names?

2. Yes, people do believe he had a proof somewhere in his mind, considering the rest of his track record. Whether that proof was correct is definitely up for debate.

Well, according to a mathematician friend of mine, he definitely did not. He went to a lot of trouble later in his life to prove things that would have followed trivially if he had had such a proof. Besides, the result is interesting enough that he obviously would have published the proof if it existed. Most likely he thought he had a proof when he made the margin note, but later found a flaw. He would have felt no need to issue a retraction, since he had never formally claimed to have a proof in the first place.

> Whether that proof was correct is definitely up for debate.

No, no it's not.

You're not really understanding mathematics, which is fair enough, but also the fundamentals of science and human nature with a statement like that.

Fermat's Last Theorem is proven true, is it not?

Without having seen the proof that came to Fermat's mind, I don't think it's anyone's absolute opinion on the matter that "It's not up for debate" and that Fermat's proof being potentially true is "missing the fundamentals of science".

If you may re-read my previous post, here's the thing people disagree on : "Did Fermat write this having a correct proof of it on his mind or not?" I do not think anyone can say an absolute "yes" or "no" to this. Although it does point to "no", considering that the mathematics used to prove FLT are far beyond Fermat's time.

His real middle name is Samuel. He had to change his middle initial because there was already a member of the Writers Guild of America with the name "David S Cohen".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_X._Cohen#Name_change

The author of this article is also the author of this book on Fermat's Last Theorem: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Fermats-Last-Theorem-Simon-Singh/dp/...

Given the eventual proof of Fermat's last theorem there's a solid argument that Fermat hadn't successfully proved it (and certainly couldn't have in the way it was eventually done), but it's also far from clear whether he actually believed he had.

And the author of the article is also the author of the book:

"The Simpsons and their Mathematical Secrets"

http://www.simonsingh.net/Simpsons_Mathematics/book/

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