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Tuesday, May 10, 2005

 

LETTER

 
Fermat’s last theorem

I was reading your on-line edition on Thursday (May 5) when I came upon the story about Prof. Edgar Escultura proving the proof advanced by Mr. Andrew Wiles and Richard Taylor on Fermat’s last theorem was incorrect. The story is at the very least incomplete and most probably untrue.

First, according to the theory, the refutation of the proof was published in 1998 and was greeted with much discussion on the Internet. A casual Google search on the terms “proof Fermat’s last theorem” yielded websites that only discuss the proof as presented by Mr. Wiles and Mr. Taylor. No mention has been made regarding Mr. Escultura nor his supposed refutation. Did your reporter, Mr. Rony V. Diaz, even made [sic] this kind of cursory search?

Second, according to the story, Mr. Wiles conceded an error regarding his proof and will be reviewing all his proof. But the e-mail was addressed to Mr. Escultura. There is no independent verification of this “supposed” concession was made [sic]. Did The Manila Times even tried to contact Mr. Wiles regarding this assertion by Mr. Escultura? Nothing in the article leads me to believe that asking Mr. Wiles nor other mathematicians was even considered.

Third, who even said that Mr. Escultura actually refuted Mr. Wiles’s proof [sic]? Who or what body was the source of this story? Whom did this person/body/ experts/ decide that Mr. Escultura was correct [sic]? To whom should the readers actually try and validate veracity of the story [sic]?

So The Times ran a story from no-one that was verified by nobody [sic]. Is this the king of journalism [sic] that The Manila Times practices [sic]?  I expected more from your paper.

Roy C. Choco
Blk. 1, lot 3, Sapphire Street,
Hiyas Subdivision, Valenzuela City

Editor’s reply

The source of our information, including the letter of Dr. Wiles, was Dr. Escultura. We did not have any reason to doubt him. Escultura published his refutation of Wiles’s proof and counterexamples to Fermat’s last theorem in: (1) Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Dynamic Systems and Applications, Atlanta, 1995. (2) Exact solutions of Fermat’s equation, Nonlinear Studies, 5(2), 1998. (3) Mathematics of the new physics, Applied Mathematics, Computation (138(2), 2001. (4) New mathematics and physics, Applied Mathematics, Computation, 139(2), 2003.

More discussions on the FLT can be found in: (1) Usenet Archives, (2) Archives of Math­forge.Net and (3) Archives of news group Sci Math, among others on the subject.

The editors who published Escultura’s refutation and counterexamples are V. Laksh­mikantham (USA), M. Sam­bandham (USA) and M. Scott (USA). Mathematicians who acknowledged and/or congratulated Escultura were R. Agarwal (USA), editor, Archives of Inequalities and Applications; G. Osipenko (Russia), editor, Electronic Journal of Differential Equations; Xilin Fu (China); L. Kusmina (Russia); V. Gudkov (Latvia).

   
 

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