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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