Several Years ago, Mathematician Andrew Wiles proved Fermat’s Last Theorem…albeit usingmodern mathematical tools not available in the time of Fermat.
This guy seems to believe he developed a proof which is naturally derived from the analysis of Pythagorean Triplets and other Diophantine equasions.
Legit?
I don’t know, but I have to wonder: If the proof is legitimate, why would the guy have to register the “fermatproof.com” domain to spread the word rather than simply submitting it to a refereed journal?
We were just talking about Fermat’s last proof in my physics class. Our professor (who just got back from doing experiments at CERN) said that when it was finally solved, using freshly discovered math, the proof ran to more than 400 pages.
The proof in your link says it is the “short-form proof,” but it also ends by saying “Therefore x^n + y^n = z^n is impossible in integers for n > 2 !!!” and, according to my physics professor, it has actually been solved for n=3 and n=4.
I have no idea if the link is legit. I just felt the need to chime in with my two cents.
love
yams!!
Getting a paper into refereed journals can be tough if they don’t recognize your name or the name of one of your coauthors. Registering a website isn’t necessarily the best way to gain credibility, though.
I took a brief look at the supposed proof. I don’t like the fact that he doesn’t appear to have explicitly constructed his model for n > 3, or even specified it clearly enough that I could do so. One of the bigger difficulties that people have run into trying to prove FLT is that it’s very easy to show that there are no integers x, y, z satisfying x[sup]3[/sup] + y[sup]3[/sup] = z[sup]3[/sup], but most of those proofs (in fact, all but the one given by Wiles) don’t generalize to higher values of n. Until I see something to change my mind, I’m going to assume that that’s what’s going on here.
That is indeed what Fermat’s Last Theorem states. There are no x,y,z such that x[sup]n[/sup] + y[sup]n[/sup] = z[sup]n[/sup] for n > 2.
By “solved” for the 3 and 4 case, your professor likely means that it was proved that there are none for n = 3 and for n = 4.
I read a book about the theorem and Wiles’ proof around the time it was submitted, and it detailed some historical attempts at a proof. There are a variety of proofs for certain classes of n, like n divisible by 3, that there are no x,y,z, but none until Wiles’ that proved for all n. The book did note that there is a short, flawed attempt at a proof found years after Fermat that may have been what Fermat actually discovered.
I took a look at this “proof”, and tried to understand it. My conclusion is that it is complete nonsense. It certainly does no more than prove the cubed case, and I’m not sure it even does that much correctly.
Ed
I’ve found an excellent refutation of this proof, unfortunately I have no room to write it in the margin.
Unfortunately the whole proof is too unclear (not complex, simply imprecise). Looks more like a proof for the need of rigour in mathematics than Fermat’s last theorum.
Fermat himself found (and published) a proof for the cases n=3 and n=4. Naïvely, it looks like the method that he used for 3 and 4 should generalize, but it turns out it doesn’t. This is probably what prompted the famous margin note: He thought he had the whole problem, but he didn’t. Of course, when he eventually discovered that his method didn’t generalize, he didn’t bother to retract his earlier claim, since he never published the claim to begin with… If you had scribbled something in a margin which turned out to be wrong, would you have bothered to correct it?