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Good afternoon, everyone. Today, I am pleased to introduce an esteemed member of the coffeeroom, one who is known for his comedic storytelling abilities, as well as for his ability to fly like a 747 (over other peoples’ heads, in the riddle thread, that is). Now I call on him to regale us with a quaint proof, of sorts, to astound and entertain us (and perhaps interest and provoke thought in a few of us).
You all know him, and love him, now please welcome our very own, the one and only, the magnificent, DR. PEPPER!
<whisper>is this a good enough place to continue the discussion?</whisper>
As many of you know, Dr. Andrew Wiles proved the theorem a number of years back after working on it at Princeton for about 7 years. My kashya was that clearly this is not the proof Fermat had in mind. Wiles proof is about 250 pages long, I believe, and goes off into areas of math that may not have even been around at the time of Fermat.
We still need a simple and direct proof of the straightforward statement of the theorem that anybody can understand. I have done some work, but am not sure if this is a good forum to share.
Squeak-
Thanks for the introduction, I can’t wait to see what the introduction to my book looks like.
As far as the proof is concerned- I’m very sorry but something came up today. When things settle down and I have more time I’ll continue the discussion. If you’re looking for a geshmaka proof you are going to be disappointed. If you’re looking for a funny dating conversation between a nerd and a ditz- I hope to make it worth your while.
Pashuteh Yid-
You are probably correct- this is most likely not the proof that Fermat had in mind (by writing that there wasn’t enough room in the margin, when in actuality he needed a whole book, he obviously had something else in mind).
In my humble opinion, the proof that Fermat had in mind would have been dis-proven had it been written down, as were hundreds of other attempts made over the years.
As the story goes, Wiles locked himself in his attic for 7 years until he had what he thought was a solid proof. Two months later a fellow professor notified him of a whole in the proof.
Together with a former student, Wiles spent 14 months or so plugging the whole.
A similar problem plagues the famous four color map theorem, proven by Appel and Haken in 1976 using a computer. We await a simple proof that can be checked by hand.
Dr. Pepper, the reason why I believe that Fermat did have a valid proof is that otherwise how could he have made such a bold statement that one will never find any triplet of integers a,b,c where a^n + b^n = c^n for any integral power n greater than 2. A single counterexample could have disproved his conjecture. A great mathematician would not have left himself open to ridicule by making such a sweeping statement if he did not have an ironclad proof.
Charlie: Did you get an email from me a few weeks ago?
I really cant follow this so i did some googling. I really dont know what the fuss is all about. this fermat guy sounds like hes nothing special. i dont know why you are so interested in what he has to say.
heres a quote from an article that references him, that i found:
Mod-80, very funny. That is about Fermat’s dopey little brother, Berel.
Pashuteh Yid-
There were theorems of his were dis-proven, one of which came to my mind on the date which I explained to the girl as part of the reasoning why I thought his last theorem would be dis-proven.
As I promised to Squeak before, as soon as things settle down at work I’ll try to write up a megilla.
Squeak, I tend to disagree with you on that. The beauty of the theorem is that if one adds two cubes together, he will always either overshoot or undershoot another nearby cube, but never hit one on the nail. Just because things are “complex” doesn’t explain why this always must be. It is amazing that it is so.
During seder, a couple of days before I went out with her, my chavrusa informed me that he drew up plans for an adapter that would convert our TI-89s into MP3 players. (Keep in mind that when the TI-89 was first released it had about 1MB of memory available to the user.) Nothing, not even a pocket protector, is as cool as walking around college holding a TI-89 attached to a small box while listening to headphones attached to the box.
Then she asked me if, in my personal opinion, before Fermats Last Theorem was proven: did I think it would be proven or disproven. To be honest, I never spent too much time thinking about it but it was time to take her for a ride.
For the record, n = 6 gives 18,446,744,073,709,551,617 which is divisible by 274,177 and 67,280,421,310,721.
I’m a biostatistics professor at a medical school and my wife is a physician. I’ll spare everyone the details of some of our seriously nerdy conversations.
charliehall-
Please can you share them?
Squeak-
“I was anticipating the “actually it’s a kohein thing” line (yes, I expect you to believe that), but I still had to hang onto my kishkes when I got to it.”
I was also anticipating it- I was just waiting for the perfect moment.
“I am loving how knocking the iron into YOU gave BOTH of you burns! I guess I should never face you with my back turned :)”
The solder we were using had a melting point of 750 degrees, how long does it need to be in contact with skin to cause a nasty burn? He accidentally knocked the tip into the back of my right hand with the back of his left hand.
“I hate your proof (if you ever meant it seriously)”
I never meant to take it seriously, I meant to give a deserving answer to the question. She did ask for it, didn’t she?
“As for the TI 89, I pegged you as a bit older. I never really had a use for one, though I did get a TI 92 once as a desk copy (mighty unusual for me). Who would have thought of using it to play music back when CD players were larger than the calculator?”
Many professors didn’t allow students to use calculators that had the QWERTY layout- the TI-92 was guilty of this. The TI-92 Plus compared to the TI-89 in functionality.
It definitely takes some creative people to use a TI-89 as an MP3 player. With 1MB of user available memory we only had enough space for a 10 second sound clip that was on a loop!
I have a TI89 and drooled over the TI92. Those were illegal in calculus class LOL.
SJSinNYC-
The TI-89 does more than the TI-92, the TI-92 PLUS has comparable functions to the TI-89. I never owned the TI-92 PLUS (ot TI-92) but the only thing I think it has better than the TI-89 is a larger screen size.
You should be careful though, I don’t think either one of them is waterproof 🙂
Squeak-
I once brought a geshmaka calculus article with me to the dentist. He took one look at it and asked what it’s for.
“Oh, if I read this in the chair I won’t feel any pain” I answered.
He looked at me quizzically and said, “I get lots of pain just from reading the title!”
Maybe its the 92plus I’m thinking of. Its the one that performed calculus and showed you the steps and gave you answers in XY form. You didn’t need values. That would have been awesome (although actually bad for math skills).
The TI-89 was able to perform symbolic differentiation and integration as well as first and second order differential equations. It didn’t show the steps though.
Did the TI-92 Plus show the steps to get to the answer or did it just show the answer in symbolic form?
I gather that I’m a few years older than you and I know that there were features added in future releases which were not in the original release. Maybe that was one of the releases?
The other graphing calculator I have is the TI-86 which will give approximate integration values if an upper and lower bound are specified, but it’s bedieved.
The TI-92 plus maybe was the one that showed the steps in symbolic form. That would have been golden.
I started in HS with a TI-83. I remember getting a program to “build” Mickey Mouse on screen.
I may be wrong but I think that the TI-89 and the TI-92 PLUS had the same software. I don’t know of it having any such feature.
Can anyone shed some light?
Well, I remember someone showing it to me. I never owned one so I may be remembering wrong though. It happens 🙂
squeak-
I said I would continue bli neder and I want to take care of my nedarim before Yom Kippur.
The only thing I have left to say is how Andrew Wiles actually ended up proving it, what went wrong, how it was fixed and one corny joke which I just had to say because it fit in.
Do you insist that I post it or are you satisfied with the Wikipedia article on the theorem?
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