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Old 04-05-2013, 09:19 AM   #1
McSweeney
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Fermat's Last Theorem

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FnXgprKgSE

"At the beginning of September I was sitting here at this desk, when suddenly, totally unexpectedly, I had this incredible revelation. It was the most ... the most important moment of my life. Nothing I do again will ever ..."

At this point, an emotional Andrew Wiles loses his composure. The British mathematics professor had an obsession since childhood with solving the world's greatest math mystery: Fermat's Last Theorem. It all started when notes of 17th century French mathematician Pierre de Fermat were discovered, and in them was a conjecture that he had written:

xn + yn = zn. You will never find numbers to fit this equation, if n is greater than 2.

What's more, Fermat said that he had written a truly wonderful proof for it, but it was too large to fit in the margins. Over the following 300 years, mathematicians had attempted to prove this conjecture themselves, without success. Some people even suggested that Fermat was just trolling when he claimed to have a proof, but it was too large to fit on the paper! By the 1970s, people had lost interest in trying to solve the world's hardest math problem, and Andrew Wiles' superiors urged him to give up his childhood dream and move onto more hip and important things, like elliptic curves! But could this seemingly unrelated field of mathematics hold the secret to solving Fermat's Last Theorem?

You don't have to be a math nerd to find this documentary interesting. I'm a math moron myself, but it did make me wish I possessed such power ...
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Old 04-09-2013, 08:18 AM   #2
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We had to read a book about this last year in my Algebra 2 class.

As I remember it, though, he claimed it was "too obvious" to be put in the margins, or that he put it on a page that was lost or something, not that it was too large to be put there.

It was quite interesting to read how he ended up solving it. Always follow your dreams, kids.
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Old 04-09-2013, 08:40 AM   #3
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>Shuckle

What he wrote in the margins was "For this I have found a truly wonderful proof, but the margin is too small to contain it".

A lot of people still think he was bullshitting, because the proof we currently have uses a lot of bits of maths that didn't exist in Fermat's day. If he did have a proof, we still don't know what it was.
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Old 04-09-2013, 09:26 AM   #4
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I'm watching this and while it's very interesting so far, the production is just so awful. The music is crap and there's random like bell sounds or something for literally no reason? It's kind of headache inducing. Also they like to go "There is no way to explain it" (3 seconds later) "so let me try to explain". >.>
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Old 04-09-2013, 09:36 AM   #5
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I mean they just started playing "one way or another" and it's like.. what does this have to do with anything? They're talking about the epsilon conjecture and they're just showing random eating people eating a diner. Why not show what it looks like or something?? Was this made in the mid eighties or something?
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Old 04-09-2013, 01:08 PM   #6
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It amuses me because he was so clearly full of shit.
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Old 04-10-2013, 01:42 AM   #7
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I thought the random *ting*s were kinda cool!

But yeah, I've hated that Blondie song ever since my brother and I were forced to play it all the time in Rock Band. I guess they wanted to liken Andrew Wiles and his obsession with solving the math problem to the crazy stalker lady that the song is originally about.
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