Say that you suddenly wake up in the year 1875. You end up talking to someone and you want to convince them that you’re from the future. How do you do that?
Say that you suddenly wake up in the year 1875. You end up talking to someone and you want to convince them that you’re from the future. How do you do that?
Istr that Ramanujan claimed that Kali gave him ideas in his dreams. Maybe he was actually a mathematician from the future but decided that telling the truth would not be feasible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan
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)