Submitted by dustofoblivion123 t3_z3cfdp in todayilearned
That was George Dantzig with some statistical problems. You don't just "accidentally" prove Fermat's last theorem, at least not the way it got solved. The people involved spent their entire lives on it.
So this equation just sat around untouched for nearly 1400 years? That's crazier than it taking almost 360 years to solve.
Some even took their lives.
Not at all. He worked on it for years, and in secret. He went so far as to regularly publish pieces of a manuscript that he'd intended as a book on a completely different subfield, just to throw off his colleagues from suspecting.
It wasn't his last theorem. Wasn't even a theorem when he wrote it, it was just a conjecture.
Yeah but "One of Fermat's Intermediate Conjectures" doesn't have the same ring to it
Well, maybe? But probably not? Think about how much time that is and how good humans are at preserving things. Its way more likely some monk somewhere worked on it, died, and they used his notes for kindling on a cold winter. The guy who solved it used all kinds of wacky math pioneered by people working in all kinds of different fields, worked on it for 10+ years, published his paper, discovered an error, and went into seclusion and wrote a whole 'nother paper addressing the error to make the original solution whole again. So its unlikely that anything Brother Simon wrote down in 700ad was terribly useful.
And anyway, Fermat's solution was probably wrong, since it was supposed to be very short.
What were any of these people doing that they ran into this problem? Did they just decide a bunch of letters numbers and symbols was probable? Did they know it was proveable when they came up with it?
It was the last one of Fermat’s theorems left unproven, and was downgraded to a conjecture after some time.
Weird effect of Stigler's law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_examples_of_Stigler%27s_law
It's not really an example of Stigler's law because it was Fermat who came up with the theorem while reading the sum of two squares problem in Arithmetica by Diophantus.
Diophantus provided a solution for finding the sum of two squares but Fermat wondered if you could do the same thing with a cube. He wrote that it wasn't possible for a cube or any greater exponent, and that he had a proof. Unfortunately he was making these notes in the margin of his copy of Arithmetica and his proof was too large to fit.
Diophantine equations is a broader category which Fermat's last theorem falls into.
Props to Fermat's marketing team
Grigory Perelman is the one you're thinking of.
Dawnawaken92 t1_ixl5obq wrote
Didn't he do it on accident cuz he thought it was homework. Or was that some other dude and equation.