Fermat

[NotAllThere]

For one of the questions on my son's number theory assignment, he's invoked Fermat's Last Theorem in the proof. I couldn't have done that when I was at university - it hadn't been proved then!

 

[MarillionFan]

For one of the questions on my son's number theory assignment, he's invoked Fermat's Last Theorem in the proof. I couldn't have done that when I was at university - it hadn't been proved then!

My son used that in his 5 times table last week at primary school, it's common place now. His faster than light equation got him a smiley face on the class rainbow.

 

[OwlHoot]

For one of the questions on my son's number theory assignment, he's invoked Fermat's Last Theorem in the proof. I couldn't have done that when I was at university - it hadn't been proved then!

What was the question, out of interest?

Seems more likely that a number theory assignment would use Fermat's Little Theorem. Are you sure that wasn't what he was talking about?

 

[Cenobite]

I couldn't have done that when I was at university - it hadn't been proved then!

Prior to Fermat's Last Theorem being proved, if you did some work that relied on Fermat's Last Theorem being true, you put a note to that effect in your work. That's why it was such a big deal when Fermat's Last Theorem was finally proved: it meant that all the other work out there which relied on it was validated.

 

[TheFaQQer]

For one of the questions on my son's number theory assignment, he's invoked Fermat's Last Theorem in the proof. I couldn't have done that when I was at university - it hadn't been proved then!

I'm old

FTFY

 

[d000hg]

When I was a kid interested in science, black holes were a theory and there was (I think) one suspected one, based on reading Brief History of Time. Now, I know a Phd student who is cataloguing hundreds if not thousands of the things.

Equally, exponential inflation models were pretty avant garde.

 

[NickFitz]

When I was a kid interested in science, black holes were a theory and there was (I think) one suspected one, based on reading Brief History of Time. Now, I know a Phd student who is cataloguing hundreds if not thousands of the things.

Equally, exponential inflation models were pretty avant garde.

When I was in the 6th Form a teacher cut out a piece from New Scientist and put it on the notice board, which announced that a charge of 1/3ev had been measured - the first experimental confirmation of the existence of quarks.

 

[sasguru]

When I was a kid interested in science, black holes were a theory and there was (I think) one suspected one, based on reading Brief History of Time. Now, I know a Phd student who is cataloguing hundreds if not thousands of the things.

Equally, exponential inflation models were pretty avant garde.

It's a shame that your interest in science didn't lead you to understand it more.
Everything in science is a theory.
Induction allows us to make generalisations but we can never be sure they won't be falsified.
The fact that we can't unify small and large-scale physics tells us that some or all parts of our fundamental understanding are incomplete or wrong.

 

[NotAllThere]

When I was in the 6th Form a teacher cut out a piece from New Scientist and put it on the notice board, which announced that a charge of 1/3ev had been measured - the first experimental confirmation of the existence of quarks.

FTFY. But I'm surprised, I thought a naked quark charge was not possible to detect.

 

[NotAllThere]

What was the question, out of interest?

Seems more likely that a number theory assignment would use Fermat's Little Theorem. Are you sure that wasn't what he was talking about?

I'll ask him when I get home - but it was definitely
x^n + y^n = z^n has no integer solutions for n>2.

What was really important about the proof of Fermat's last theorem, is that it was proved as part of wider conjecture (Taniyama–Shimura-Weil conjecture) that had been widely assumed to be true, and unified two disparate parts of mathematics - number theory (elliptic curves) and algebraic geometry (modular forms).

The theorem fell out of that proof as a corollary.