Wednesday, June 16, 2010
Fermat's Last Theorem Silliness
I am fascinated by cranks and crank mathematics, and there's a lot of them/it out there. Here's a new "proof" of Fermat's last theorem I was sent yesterday. There is only a small amount of entertainment value in this one, with phrases such as "only one of those cofactors is organically entered into the structure of the pair of conjugate variables". Much better is the book The Life-Romance of an Algebraist by George Winslow Pierce.
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2 comments:
That curious phrase sounds better in Russian:
"только один из них органически входит в состав пары сопряжённых величин"
Around 2003, I was sent a little booklet containing an "elementary proof of Fermat's last theorem", in Greek, written by some a "mathematics aficionado", published by a photocopy shop in the city of Patras, Greece. It was about 30 pages long and claimed to have proved the theorem using high-school only mathematics. The author was bitter, in the introduction, about having failed to publish his work in a journal. Unfortunately, I didn't keep a copy of it...
As for the proof of the Russian (Armenian?) fellow you received, one has to simply observe the fonts, structure and horrible layout!
Oh, yes, he has even "copyrighted" it. So we can't steal the proof!
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