Comment by kadoban
1 month 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.
1 month 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.
The funny thing is that whether or not he had a proof, it was only definitively proved because he claimed he had a proof, so in a roundabout sense, he's still responsible for the theorem being proved. It's kind of crazy to think about your words carrying so much weight that somebody from hundreds of years in the future will dedicate (a significant portion of) their life to them.
> he's still responsible for the theorem being proved.
I think you have an odd definition of "responsible". Many (most?) theorems start out as conjectures, and I would strongly disagree that just because someone first formulated a problem that they're "responsible" for the eventual solution.
It's not just that he formulated the problem, though. It was specifically the fact that he claimed he had a proof which led to the proof, and it was only because people credibly believed he had one that they spent so much effort trying to (supposedly, re-)discover it.
2 replies →
I think he had a hunch, and maybe in his mathematic mind he got to the right answer by the wrong path
But yes had him not pointed it out maybe it would have been relegated to a mathematical curiosity or something
I think there's a deeper (but simpler) reason for it, besides the way Wiles proved it
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.
[dead]
Quite literally, WTF is that supposed to mean?
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