Comment by sharkjacobs
16 hours ago
> Countless other mathematical curiosities were developed in the 1700s -- and forgotten.
Really? Like what?
edit: this is either an unfalsifiable claim, because by "forgotten" you meant here is no extant knowledge or remaining record of it, or it's almost certainly nonsense and anything you could cite would be foundational to some area of modern mathematics, even if as a disproven counter theory.
"... but this margin is not large enough to contain it." Sound familiar?
Now, it's possible that Fermat thought he had a proof of his theorem, but that it would have turned out to be wrong. That happens sometimes. But he did not write it down on any document that has survived to this day, so we know that he had something that has been lost.
It's similar to history. We know that there are books, plays, etc. that used to exist, but that nobody knows today. Because other writings that have survived to this day quote from them. But beyond the quote, we don't know anything else about the play or the book or whatever.
Fermat's Last Theorem almost certainly isn't the only case of mathematical theories that we know were published somewhere but that we have no record of today. It's just the only one that I happen to know about, not being a mathematician myself. I'm sure there are some people on HN who know of others.
A maybe example that springs to mind is how Gauss discovered the FFT in the early 1800s (predating even Fourier analysis) but didn't find it interesting enough to publish, so while his work was important, it was also forgotten and had to be rediscovered.
Goddamn Gauss, man.
Really hardcore spherical trigonometry comes to mind, but I may be off by a century. It used to be considered fundamental, but almost nobody besides maybe a few historians of mathematics knows the methods anymore.