Youri Kraskov - The Wonders of Arithmetic from Pierre Simon de Fermat

Georg Cantor has developed his theory of sets, which other mathematicians such as, for example, Henri Poincaré, called all sorts of bad words and did not want to admit at all. But suddenly unexpected for everyone the respectable "Royal Society of London" (the English Academy of Sciences) in 1904 decided to award Cantor with its medal. So, it turns out that here is the point, where the fates of science are decided! 20 20 If some very respected public institution thus encourages the development of science then what one can object? However, such an emerging unknown from where the generosity and disinterestedness from the side of the benefactors who didn’t clear come from, looks somehow strange if not to say knowingly biased. Indeed, it has long been well known where these “good intentions” come from and whither they lead and the result of these acts is also obvious. The more institutions there are for encouraging scientists, the more real science is in ruins. What is costed only one Nobel Prize for "discovery" of, you just think … accelerated scattering of galaxies!!!

Pic. 27. Georg Cantor

And everything would be fine, but suddenly another trouble struck again. Out of nowhere in this very theory of sets insurmountable contradictions began to appear, which are also described in great detail in Singh’s book. In the scientific community everyone immediately was alarmed and began to think about how to solve this problem. But it has rested as on the wall and in no way did not want to be solved. Everyone was somehow depressed, but then they yet cheered up again.

It was so happened because now David Hilbert himself got down to it, the great mathematician that first solved the very difficult Waring problem, which has a direct relationship to the FLT. 21 21 Waring's problem is the statement that any positive integer N can be represented as a sum of the same powers x i n , i.e. in the form N = x 1 n + x 2 n + … + x k n . It was in very complex way first proven by Hilbert in 1909, and in 1920 the mathematicians Hardy and Littlewood simplified the proof, but their methods were not yet elementary. And only in 1942 the Soviet mathematician Yu. V. Linnik has published arithmetic proof using the Shnielerman method. The Waring-Hilbert theorem is of fundamental importance from the point of view the addition of powers and does not contradict to FLT since there are no restrictions on the number of summands. It is also curious that Hilbert repeated Euler's experiment apparently inspired by the FLT problem. It seems that at some point Euler began to have doubts that the FLT is generally provable and he assumed the equation a 4+b 4+c 4=d 4also like Fermat’s equation a n+b n=c nfor n>2 in integers is unsolvable, but in the end it turned out that he was wrong. 22 22 A counterexample refuting Euler’s hypothesis is 95800 4 + 217519 4 + 414560 4 = 422481 4 . Another example 2682440 4 +15365639 4 +18796760 4 =20615673 4 . For the fifth power everything is much simpler. 27 5 +84 5 +110 5 +133 5 =144 5 . It is also possible that a general method of such calculations can be developed if we can obtain the corresponding constructive proof of the Waring's problem.

Pic. 28. David Hilbert

Following the example of Euler on the eve of the 20th century, Hilbert offered to the scientific community 23 problems, which according to his assumption, are unlikely to be solved in the foreseeable future. Nevertheless, Hilbert's colleagues coped with them rather quickly, while Euler’s hypothesis has held almost until the 21st century and was only refuted with the help of computers, what is also described in Singh’s book. So, the suspicion that the FLT was merely an assumption of its author has lost any reason.

Hilbert had not cope with overcoming contradictions in set theory and could not do it because this problem is not at all mathematical, but informational one, so computer scientists should solve it sooner or later and when this happened, they are surprisingly very easily (and absolutely true) found a solution just forbidding closed chains of links. 23 23 Of course, this does not mean that computer scientists understand this problem better than Hilbert. They just had no choice because closed links are looping and this will lead to the computer freezing. It is clear Hilbert could not know about it then and decided that the most reliable barrier to contradictions can be provided with the help of axioms. But axioms cannot be created on empty place and must come out of something and this something is a number, but what it is, no one can explain this not then nor now.

A brilliant example of what can be created with axioms is given in the same book of Singh. The obvious incident with the lack of a clear formulation to the notion of a number can accidentally spoil any rainbow picture and something needs to be done with it. It gets especially unpleasant with the justification of the “complex numbers”. Perhaps this caused the appearance in the Singh’s book of Appendix 8 called “Axioms of arithmetic”, in which 5 previously known axioms relating to a count are not mentioned at all (otherwise the idea will not past), while those that define the basic properties of numbers are complemented and a new axiom appears so that it must exist the numbers n and k, such that n+k=0 and then everything will be in the openwork!

Of course, Singh himself would never have guessed this. It is clearly visible here the help of consultants who for some reason forgot to change the name of the application since these are no longer axioms of arithmetic because already nothing is left of it. 24 24 The axiom that the sum of two positive integers can be equal to zero is clearly not related to arithmetic since with numbers that are natural or derived from them this is clearly impossible. But if there is only algebra and no arithmetic, then also not only a such things would become possible. The school arithmetic, which for a long time barely kept on the multiplication table and the proportions, is now completely drained. Instead it, now there is full swing mastering of the calculator and computer. If such “progress” continues further, then the transition to life on trees for our civilization will occur very quickly and naturally.

Against this background a truly outstanding scientific discovery was made in Wikipedia, which simply has no equal in terms of art and the scale of misinformation. For a long time, many people thought that there are only four actions of arithmetic, these are addition and subtraction, multiplication and division. But no! There are also exponentiation and … root extraction (???). The authors of the articles given us this "knowledge" through Wikipedia clearly blundered because extracting the root is the same exponentiation only not with the integer power, but with fractional one. No of course, they knew about it, but what they didn’t guess was that it was they who copied this arithmetic action at Euler himself from that very book about the wonder-algebra 25 25 It is curious that even Euler (apparently by mistake) called root extraction the operation inverse to exponentiation [8], although he knew very well that this is not so. But this is no secret that even very talented people often get confused in very simple things. Euler obviously did not feel the craving for the formal construction of the foundations of science since he always had an abundance of all sorts of other ideas. He thought that with the formalities could also others coped, but it turned out that it was from here the biggest problem grew. .