sirseatbelt

sirseatbelt t1_ixmqsjb wrote

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.

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