Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

Siberian Engineer Proves Fermat's Last Theorem on TV

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • Siberian Engineer Proves Fermat's Last Theorem on TV

    NEWS YOU CAN AFFORD TO MISS
    By Anna Arutunyan

    Moscow News (Russia)
    August 31, 2005

    Siberian Engineer Proves Fermat's Last Theorem on TV

    An engineering professor from Siberia's Omsk, Alexander Ilyin, proved
    the ever-elusive Fermat's Theorem live before TV cameras. Last week,
    NTV aired 15 minutes of the professor proving the theorem. The proof
    has yet to stand up to the tests of the Russian Academy of Science,
    and if it holds up, it will be published in one of the academy's
    scientific journals. Pierre de Fermat came up with the theorem in
    1660. Since then, mathematicians have been struggling to prove it.
    Andrew Wiles finally proved the theorem in 1994, basing his proof on
    the Shimura-Taniyama-Weil Conjecture. But mathematicians from around
    the world are still trying their hand.

    Those Russians are always coming up with something. Couple of years
    back, folks from Armenia astonished the world with their 100 percent
    effective AIDS cure. Oh, wait, Armenians aren't Russian... Still,
    Lenin invented the light bulb, the steam engine, and I'll bet he
    even proved Fermat's Last Theorem back in grade school. What, like
    it's hard? I never could figure out why Yutaka Taniyama had to get
    into elliptic curves just to prove a theorem that would help prove
    Fermat's theorem. He committed suicide, by the way. So the theorem
    states that the equation xn+yn=zn has no non-zero integer solutions
    for x, y, and z where n > 2. What's there to prove? Let's have x=1,
    y=2, and z=3. For n=3, you get 1+8 =27. See? That wasn't so hard. I'd
    explain further, there's just not enough space on page 11.
Working...
X