Possible Proof of ABC Conjecture 102
submeta writes "Shinichi Mochizuki of Kyoto University has released a paper which claims to prove the decades-old ABC conjecture, which involves the relationship between prime numbers, addition, and multiplication. His solution involves thinking of numbers not as members of sets (the standard interpretation), but instead as objects which exist in 'new, conceptual universes.' As one would expect, the proof is extremely dense and difficult to understand, even for experts in the field, so it may take a while to verify. However, Mochizuki has a strong reputation, so this is likely to get attention. Proof of the conjecture could potentially lead to a revolution in number theory, including a greatly simplified proof of Fermat's Last Theorem."
This has already been worked on... (Score:5, Funny)
...and solved. I think it was the early (19)70's. A researcher named Jackson
(with the help of his brothers) came to the conclusion that it was simple as 1-2-3.
Additional verification shown that do-re-mi fit the bill as well. At the time, people
were sing all about it - I'm surprised this has come up again.
Re:Linking to Wikipedia to explain math (Score:3, Funny)
For anyone with a suitable background ..., Wikipedia's math articles are generally the best, most accurate and most comprehensive free source of basic mathematics information available. If you don't have that background, no article of any kind is going to be explain to what a "scheme" is, for example. To think so is as naive as believing that you can understand all the nuances of Baudelaire's poetry without learning French; you may think you learn something from a translation into your language, but you actually don't.
Goethe's comment is relevant here:
Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them they translate into their own language, and it immediately becomes something entirely different.