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AnthrallicA t1_ixla0fq wrote

So this equation just sat around untouched for nearly 1400 years? That's crazier than it taking almost 360 years to solve.

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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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atticdoor t1_ixnhcwv wrote

The title contradicts itself- it says that the famous equation of Fermat's Last Theorem was come up with by Diophantus in the third century, and first stated by Fermat in 1637.

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InterestingPatient49 t1_ixnor16 wrote

Weird effect of Stigler's law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_examples_of_Stigler%27s_law

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retour-a-tipasa t1_ixo3gi3 wrote

It's not really an example of Stigler's law because it was Fermat who came up with the theorem while reading the sum of two squares problem in Arithmetica by Diophantus.

Diophantus provided a solution for finding the sum of two squares but Fermat wondered if you could do the same thing with a cube. He wrote that it wasn't possible for a cube or any greater exponent, and that he had a proof. Unfortunately he was making these notes in the margin of his copy of Arithmetica and his proof was too large to fit.

Diophantine equations is a broader category which Fermat's last theorem falls into.

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Dawnawaken92 t1_ixl5obq wrote

Didn't he do it on accident cuz he thought it was homework. Or was that some other dude and equation.

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smdth_567 t1_ixl8od9 wrote

That was George Dantzig with some statistical problems. You don't just "accidentally" prove Fermat's last theorem, at least not the way it got solved. The people involved spent their entire lives on it.

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dentrolusan t1_ixltxkw wrote

Not at all. He worked on it for years, and in secret. He went so far as to regularly publish pieces of a manuscript that he'd intended as a book on a completely different subfield, just to throw off his colleagues from suspecting.

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InterestingPatient49 t1_ixm1ci9 wrote

It wasn't his last theorem. Wasn't even a theorem when he wrote it, it was just a conjecture.

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Embite t1_ixmfhky wrote

Yeah but "One of Fermat's Intermediate Conjectures" doesn't have the same ring to it

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beachedwhale1945 t1_ixnj7oc wrote

It was the last one of Fermat’s theorems left unproven, and was downgraded to a conjecture after some time.

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Celebrity292 t1_ixn34lv wrote

What were any of these people doing that they ran into this problem? Did they just decide a bunch of letters numbers and symbols was probable? Did they know it was proveable when they came up with it?

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