But I am not sure if the book covers the mistake and later correction. I has been more than a decade sine I read the book (and became a fan of the author).
Agreed. I bought it at the airport for a transatlantic flight the year it came out and started reading before lift off. Completed it before landing. Best flight ever.
I'll check that out - I loved his "The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography". Excellent introduction to cryptography.
Recent LLM dingers like the Jacobian Conjecture counterexample have challenged the efficient mathematics hypothesis. The JC counterexample was so small in degree and coefficient. It should have been a "low fruit" in the scheme of things, but alas, unpicked for 50+ years with considerable attention from good mathematicians.
With respect to FLT, my hopes have modestly increased that a truly marvelous demonstration of this proposition does in fact exist, that Fermat actually had it, and that it may someday be recovered!
edit: some emphasis on modest. But let me be romantic here!
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 presentation! This may have been the same proof that Fermat had in mind.
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. I has been more than a decade sine 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
It does. That’s all part of the drama.
One of the best books I’ve ever read.
Agreed. I bought it at the airport for a transatlantic flight the year it came out and started reading before lift off. Completed it before landing. Best flight ever.
Would it be good on audio?
Maybe. Most of it is just good storytelling. There are some light equations and graphs occasionally.
I'll check that out - I loved his "The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography". Excellent introduction to cryptography.
It does! Very dramatic part of the book.
Recent LLM dingers like the Jacobian Conjecture counterexample have challenged the efficient mathematics hypothesis. The JC counterexample was so small in degree and coefficient. It should have been a "low fruit" in the scheme of things, but alas, unpicked for 50+ years with considerable attention from good mathematicians.
With respect to FLT, my hopes have modestly increased that a truly marvelous demonstration of this proposition does in fact exist, that Fermat actually had it, and that it may someday be recovered!
edit: some emphasis on modest. But let me be romantic here!
This is the most offensively-themed serious site I have ever seen.
In their defense, this probably looked really cool in 2000, when this was published (or at least, last updated).
But agreed, that lime green is horrendous.
On purely aesthetic grounds I'll take this over another substack-like site any day of the week.
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 presentation! This may have been the same proof that Fermat had in mind.
From 2000.
Posting because he's retiring this year?