Today I received my first email from someone claiming to have a short proof of Fermat's Last Theorem. They even forwarded someone else's rejection of their argument, which points out their basic misunderstanding of factorisation.
Maybe it's urban legend, but I heard at some point that Cambridge had hired someone full time to respond to such letters. A friend of mine here at King's (who has been teaching the Elementary Number Theory course here for the past few years and is listed on the website as the instructor) recently received a whole book (self-published) with elementary "proofs" of all the major problems in number theory.
Wednesday, May 06, 2009
Saturday, May 02, 2009
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