> That post alluded to a solution with a mistake still outstanding. I wanted to
> make it clear that the proof is done now.
I think you have misread my post. I thought I made it clear that Wiles’s proof is a true proof. What I said was that long before Wiles announced his proof in 1993, other mathematicians had come up with supposed proofs which didn’t quite work. They had subtle mistakes in them that it’s possible that Fermat might have been fooled by, so perhaps one of them was the mistaken proof that Fermat thought of. What I said was that Wiles’s true proof of the theorem could not possibly have been the proof that Fermat was thinking of. Wiles’s proof requires math that Fermat couldn’t possibly have known about.
You fellas evidfently misdsed my old sig line (And I reprinted it a week or so ago in the Sig Line thread):
**“I give up – how do you keep a mathematician busy for 350 years?”
From what I have heard of Pierre de Fermat, he was a mathematician whose insights greatly exceeded his (or a great many of his contemporaries) mathematical abilities.
In other words, he could propose theorems that were easily understood but exceedingly difficult to prove. The best example of which is the legendary “last theorem”. I think I first heard of that when I was in the 9th grade. The statement:
A[sup]n[/sup] + B [sup]n[/sup] = C[sup]n[/sup], where A B C and n are integers, will only have solutions when n is no greater than 2
can be understood by a grammar school student . However, the proof, (as we know) is phenomenally difficult.
Another of his theorems,
2[sup]2[sup]n[/sup][/sup]+1 will yield prime numbers for all integer values of n
held true in his day, mainly because the first values 5 of n (from n=0 through 4) equal: 3 , 5 , 17 , 257 and 65,537 which were known to be primes.
The next number 4,294,967,297 (where n=5) couldn’t be tested for primality in Fermat’s day, so Pierre said that was also prime. AND when n=6 and larger the numbers become astronomically huge with no hope of testing their primality many centuries ago.
By the time Fermat was proven wrong on this theorem by the mathematician Euler (who was able to factorize 4,294,967,297), Pierre had long since shuffled off this mortal coil and so his reputation (while he was living) remained intact. As a matter of fact, the formula yields primes only for the values n=0 through 4.
It is because of these simple statements with mind-boggling proofs, that led one of Fermat’s contemporaries to call him “that French bastard !!!”