Has anyone proven the Theorem yet?
And, on a side note, I seem to remember a story where the protagonist cheated the Devil out of his soul by asking him to prove Fermat’s Last Theorem. Anyone else recall this?
He weathered a firestorm of agony and did not break.
And while Yori raged against his unbending
courage, we took Kyuden Hiruma back.
His loss is great, but so is the gift his suffering brought.
-Yakamo’s Funeral
Yep, Andrew Wiles found a truly remarkable proof, much too large to fit in the margins of that book, in 1994 (there was a gap in his proof, but it’s since been filled in).
“Kings die, and leave their crowns to their sons. Shmuel HaKatan took all the treasures in the world, and went away.”
From what I’ve heard, the proof actually doesn’t have anything to do with FLT at first glance. He actually proved something else (about elliptical integrals or something like that) which turns out to be coupled in some byzantine fashion to FLT.
However, the general consensus from those who can understand the proof itself and the relationship between it and FLT is that it’s valid.
The other general consensus is that no way did Fermat come up with this particular proof. In fact most people think he didn’t actually have a proof at all (he may have THOUGHT he did, though).
Basically, torq said it.
Fermat’s Last Theorem has been proved.
However, Fermat’s Last Theorem has never been discovered.
I think that Fermat was alive for many years after he wrote his famous note, and he never committed his “elegant” theorem to paper.
I think that either a) he thought he had come up with one, but later he saw it was flawed, OR b) he was just pulling our leg.
I lean toward “a.”
I believe he proved something called Taniyama’s Conjecture, which implied that FLT is true.
Fermat’s Last Theory, the tortured soul that it is, wrote a heart-wrending article for The Onion (www.theonion.com) entitled, “Nobody Understands Me.”
I weep for the death of the soul.
“The Good deserve a higher plane of existence than this life can offer, The Bad an even higher.”
Let’s not forget that the great Usenet personality, Archimedes Plutonium, solved Fermat’s Last Theorem. Using q-adic numbers, I think. That’s the kind of thinking you can do when you have a plutonium atom in the center of your brain…
I agree with Gilligan. Everything I’ve read on it says that some guy, Taniyama, came up with Taniyama’s Conjecture. However he couldn’t prove his conjecture was true. If it was it proved Fermat’s theorem.
So later on that Wiley (or whatever his name was) came along and proved Taniyama’s Conjecture. Thus in a roundabout way proving the theorem.
I saw a TV program on Andrew Wiles. He always intended to prove Fermat’s last theorem. After years, he realised that proving Taniyama’s Conjecture would also prove Fermat.
So he did.
Why doesn’t the sun come out at night when the light would be more useful? (Pratchett)
What Archie Ludwig von Ludwig Plutonium (thinks he) proved is that FLT is FALSE. Of course, in order to do this, he had to redefine what the problem meant.
Archie is the main reason I stopped reading sci.chem. He decided to rename all the elements for the benefit of us mere mortals and as a service to future generations decided that while he was at it he might as well extend the periodic table up to Z=1000 or so; he posted these… one per message… to sci.chem and the resulting clutter, combined with confused but well-intentioned newbies trying to reason with him and his responses, finally exceeded my tolerance level. Well, the continual thinly veiled requests for drug recipes didn’t help any either.
Gosh, I haven’t read Usenet in years, and seeing Archie’s name here (nee Lugwig) was like the blast from the past. What amazing resilience.
Anyway, the best way to deal with Archie (and those who reply to him) is the killfile.