Andrew Wiles on proving Fermat’s Last Theorem (1995) [video]

www.youtube.com
jackdoe
3 days ago
30points
15 comments

Comments

elromulous2 hours ago
(disclaimer: I haven't watched this yet)

Mathematicians / folks knowledgeable on the subject - do you think Fermat had an error in his (lost) proof? Or that there exists a solution that perhaps is more straightforward than Wiles's?

My understanding is that Wiles had to use a ton of math (and invent some new math?) that had not yet been invented in Fermat's time.

kadoban1 hour ago
Consensus is that there's no way he had a correct, general proof.

My personal guess is he figured out later that his proof was broken or limited and never got around to fixing it.

odyssey735 minutes ago
We haven’t yet reached the era in which we’re allowed to know about the technique. The simple, intuitive proof will become available to us when the time is right.
lmntryflt25 minutes ago
[dead]
jerkstate1 hour ago
I don't know that much about math but I've read that one possibility is he had found a valid proof for n=4 and assumed that it generalized. Hopefully someone else who knows more about the subject chimes in!
BinRoo3 days ago
Aside: the AI summary of this attributes the wrong person. This is Andrew Wiles.
OJFord2 hours ago
Do you mean Atish Joygobin, for the background music?
kurthr3 hours ago
Who solved FLT.
alex11382 hours ago
I've only skimmed it but Simon Singh's book on it seems reasonably accessible to non-experts

One interesting thing of FLT is Wiles is on record as saying it opened the door (I think. This is from memory) to Langlands Program, a series of mathematical connections

Harder problems of course exist, Riemann Hypothesis et al but FLT still took hundreds of years to solve

hingler362 hours ago
I read Singh's book a few years ago, I really enjoyed it and left with a basic understanding of the underlying math
QuesnayJr2 hours ago
You remember correctly. His result is a special case of Langlands.
pseudohadamard2 days ago
Just to check, this video isn't NSFW is it?
convolutedsoup2 hours ago
This comment left me so bewildered that I wanted to create a hackernews account just to comment this.
esafak2 hours ago
It might be a joke in reference to the video's title, "I loved every minute of it, however hard it had been".
jackdoe2 days ago
depends, I would say it is not safe for work as it makes you question what are you doing there :)

its phenomenology porn

ThrowawayTestr3 hours ago
YouTube generally doesn't allow that