31–37 of 37 posts
I'm not a mathematician and AI doesn't answer very well. Could someone tell us how big an endeavour this is: https://github.com/ImperialCollegeLondon/FLT ? (the site is : "An ongoing multi-author open source project to formalise a proof of Fermat's Last Theorem in the Lean theorem prover.")
Wiles' proof is 129 pages long, and builds on results that require a vast amount of infrastructure to define.
It's going to take dozens of person-years.
This is the most offensively-themed serious site I have ever seen.
The view-source is like a portal to Year 2000. Table-based layout, font tags, map/area tags. Only thing missing is an unnecessarily imported jQuery.
I have a truly marvellous comment on this, which this comment box is too small to contain.
FWIW, it seems pretty clear that while Fermat briefly thought he had a proof, he fairly quickly realized it was flawed since he never mentioned this publicly and later went on to develop a proof just for the simple n=4 case. In 1847 Gabriel Lami presented a claimed (simple) general proof to the French Academy of Sciences, only for the flawed assumption in it to be pointed out immediately at the end of his presentatio…
This is the most offensively-themed serious site I have ever seen.
This was an excellent introduction to this topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermat%27s_Last_Theorem_(book) by Simon Singh But I am not sure if the book covers the mistake and later correction. It has been more than a decade since I read the book (and became a fan of the author).
The BBC did an episode of Horizon on it. https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0074rxx
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not really, the incentives for each are not binary values. There are bounties on the 10 millennium problems (that haven't been increased in 25 years), but there isn't much motivation beyond that. You get some street cred and your name in a prestigious journal. That's not-nothing but can't hold a candle to the potential fortunes of the market.
i think you have no idea what you're saying... > That's not-nothing but can't hold a candle to the potential fortunes of the market. a market is where things are sold and bought. there are lots of markets which aren't as well capitalized as financial markets - your local farmer's market doesn't "hold a candle to the potential fortunes of the market" but it's still a market (and presumably the efficient market hypothe…
The market for solving math problems is tiny compared to selling/ running algos for trading. You solve a pure math problem you might get accolades from some professors.
Higher mathematics is just a different world to those of us who haven't even a clue how that world functions.