Andrew Wiles on proving Fermat’s Last Theorem (1995) [video]

jjackdoe 3 days ago 14 commentsRead Article on youtube.com

Full documentary: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0074rxx

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elromulous•40 minutes ago

(disclaimer: I haven't watched this yet)

Mathematicians / folks knowledgeable on the subject - do you think Fermat had an error in his (lost) proof? Or that there exists a solution that perhaps is more straightforward than Wiles's?

My understanding is that Wiles had to use a ton of math (and invent some new math?) that had not yet been invented in Fermat's time.

kadoban•2 minutes 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.

jerkstate•11 minutes ago

I don't know that much about math but I've read that one possibility is he had found a valid proof for n=4 and assumed that it generalized. Hopefully someone else who knows more about the subject chimes in!

BinRoo•3 days ago

Aside: the AI summary of this attributes the wrong person. This is Andrew Wiles.

OJFord•about 1 hour ago

Do you mean Atish Joygobin, for the background music?

kurthr•about 2 hours ago

Who solved FLT.

alex1138•about 1 hour ago

I've only skimmed it but Simon Singh's book on it seems reasonably accessible to non-experts

One interesting thing of FLT is Wiles is on record as saying it opened the door (I think. This is from memory) to Langlands Program, a series of mathematical connections

Harder problems of course exist, Riemann Hypothesis et al but FLT still took hundreds of years to solve

hingler36•about 1 hour ago

I read Singh's book a few years ago, I really enjoyed it and left with a basic understanding of the underlying math

QuesnayJr•about 1 hour ago

You remember correctly. His result is a special case of Langlands.

pseudohadamard•1 day ago

Just to check, this video isn't NSFW is it?

convolutedsoup•about 1 hour ago

This comment left me so bewildered that I wanted to create a hackernews account just to comment this.

esafak•about 1 hour ago

It might be a joke in reference to the video's title, "I loved every minute of it, however hard it had been".

jackdoe•1 day ago

depends, I would say it is not safe for work as it makes you question what are you doing there :)

its phenomenology porn

ThrowawayTestr•about 2 hours ago

YouTube generally doesn't allow that