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Nominull comments on Rationality Quotes: April 2011 - Less Wrong
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Uh I believe you will find that Fermat in fact had a truly marvelous proof of his last theorem? The only thing he was waiting on was the invention of a wider margin.
Little-known non-fact: there were wider margins available at the time, but it was not considered socially acceptable to use them for accurate proofs, or more generally for true statements at all; they were merely wide margins for error.
I wonder how much the fame of Fermat's Last Theorem is due to the fact that, (a) he claimed to have found a proof, and (b) nobody was able to prove it. Had he merely stated it as a conjecture without claiming that he had proven it, would anywhere near the same effort have been put into proving it?
Almost certainly not. A lot of the historical interest came precisely because he claimed to have a proof. In fact, there were a fair number of occasions where he claimed to have a proof and a decent chunk of number theory in the 1700s and early 1800s was finding proofs for the statements that Fermat had said he had a proof for. It was called "Fermat's Last Theorem" because it was the last one standing of all his claims.