Comment by Xcelerate
4 days ago
I feel like there’s an interesting follow-up problem which is: what’s the shortest possible proof of FLT in ZFC (or perhaps even a weaker theory like PA or EFA since it’s a Π^0_1 sentence)?
Would love to know whether (in principle obviously) the shortest proof of FLT actually could fit in a notebook margin. Since we have an upper bound, only a finite number of proof candidates to check to find the lower bound :)
Even super simple results like uniqueness of prime factorisation can pages of foundational mathematics to formalise rigorously. The Principia Mathematica famously takes entire chapters to talk about natural numbers (although it's not ZFC, to be fair). For that reason I think it's pretty unlikely.
> we have an upper bound
Is Wiles' proof even in ZFC?
Your question is explored in https://www.cs.umd.edu/users/gasarch/BLOGPAPERS/fltlargecard...
Thanks. So if I read this correctly - there is consensus that Wiles' proof can be reduced to ZFC and PA (and maybe even much weaker theories). But as presented Wiles proof relies on Grothendieck's works and Grothendieck could not care less about foundationalism, so no such reduction is known and we don't really have a lower bound even for ZFC.
I would be surprised if it wasn’t. Maybe some part of depends on the continuum hypothesis, but ZFC is pretty powerful