Philosophy Now Forum

FLT goes back to the 16th century. It has no practical use.

If you're into recreational math, then you're in luck. But recreational math has no importance for solving equations. FLT is about failure, it says for xⁿ + yⁿ = zⁿ, you won't find any equations for n greater than 2.

It seems that the difficulty in solving FLT helps make it interesting. But there are other math theorems for which solutions haven't been found, but they haven't achieved the fame that FLT has.

What do you think?

PhilX

Philosophy Explorer wrote: ↑Sat Mar 10, 2018 9:36 pm

What do you think?

Wiles's proof opened up new areas of math. What he really proved was the Tanayama-Shimura conjecture. This has implications far beyond that of a number theoretic curiosity.

As far as FLT having no practical applications, higher math never has any practical applications ... till it does. Non-Euclidean geometry had no practical application till some fellow named Einstein came along. A more striking application is that the theory of factoring large integers had no practical application for 2000 years till public key cryptography came along in the 1980's. It became the basis of online commerce in the 1990's and 2000's, and it's the basis of cryptocurrencies today.

"higher math never has any practical applications ... till it does. Non-Euclidean geometry had no practical application till some fellow named Einstein came along."

"This should be written in letters of gold above all our temples" (William Blake).