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A Mathematician’s Apology.
The Last Problem
“It looked so simple, and yet all the great mathematicians in history couldn’t solve it. Here was a problem that I, a ten-year-old, could understand and I knew from that moment that I would never let it go. I had to solve it.”
The City of God,
The story of Fermat’s Last Theorem revolves around the search for a missing proof. Mathematical proof is far more powerful and rigorous than the concept of proof we casually use in our everyday language, or even the concept of proof as understood by physicists or chemists. The difference between scientific and mathematical proof is both subtle and profound, and is crucial to understanding the work of every mathematician since Pythagoras. The idea of a classic mathematical proof is to begin with a series of axioms, statements that can be assumed to be true or that are self-evidently true. Then
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mathematics does not rely on evidence from fallible experimentation, but it is built on infallible logic.
mathematics is a subject that is not subjective.
The Last Problem,
Mathematical Magic Show
I have a truly marvelous demonstration of this proposition which this margin is too narrow to contain.
History of Mathematics.
“In Scotland there exists at least one field, containing at least one sheep, at least one side of which is black.”
“God exists since mathematics is consistent, and the Devil exists since we cannot prove it.”
The Last Theorem was a mathematical siren, luring geniuses toward it, only to dash their hopes.
The proof is a masterpiece of modern mathematics, which leads to the inevitable conclusion that Wiles’s proof of the Last Theorem is not the same as Fermat’s.
