Ecco the dolphin

I am a time-traveling dolphin. An entity made of giant balls gave me the ability to breathe underwater, but this ability was recently stolen from me by aliens.

Sometimes I turn into a bird.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: May 13th, 2024

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  • I mean… Ramanujan was the GOAT, but he was still able to do his proofs. That’s more or less my point. He didn’t suddenly convert a bunch of Oxford mathematicians to Hinduism because he was able to do incredible math proofs (i think they would have been similarly unconvinced he was a time traveller). The proof was in the pudding… in the proofs.

    In order to do Wile’s proof of Fermat’s last theorem, you have to invent 100 years of math from memory, something Wiles himself would (almost certainly) struggle to do, but maybe he could pull it off. I remember reading an article about Wile’s proof, and he was incredibly humble about it, and described it as a collaborative effort between himself and his peers IIRC. The proof itself wasn’t complete without a correction from another math academic IIRC. This thread is like, kind of a misunderstanding of math academics.

    In 1875 you don’t have ZFC set theory and Cantor’s works are bleeding edge (I think Cantor’s work is controversial and incomplete in this time… fuck it, maybe you should just work with Cantor himself if you can find him. Maybe he’d believe you. I didn’t take math history IDK)

    I cannot find a source to link to it now but I remember reading through Godel’s incompleteness theorem, a proof of Fermat’s theorem isn’t possible without the extensions of classical mathematics that were developed in the 20th century.

    You’ll have to take my word for it on that last bit. I’m a time traveling dolphin, after all.

    Anyway, that’s more or less my point, you’d have to basically be an incredibly talented math professor (in theoretical mathematics, not applied) to demonstrate this proof to satisfaction to a bunch of professors in 1875. You’d also probably have to be white and male. It’s just not something a casual lemmy poster can like, do, you know? There’s a reason that Fermat’s theorem wasn’t proven for 350 years despite being accepted as true.

    (edit: I am tired so this is rambley)


  • You get into any university, ask to get the math/physics teachers together and present it to them, this certainly will start a chain reaction.

    The demonstration of the proof is actually incredibility complicated. You’d need to develop many new concepts of mathematics (all requiring proper proofs and getting your new contemporaries to agree with you) before you can preform it.

    All without the use of a electronic calculator and modern computer graphing and visualization techniques.

    I’m not convinced its actually feasible… You’d be recognized as one of the greatest mathematicians of all time from all the new concepts you’ve introduced, not just the proof for Fermat’s last theorem. I’d pick something else. Like predicting an earthquake or something.