Pero ¿qué dices, Carlos Pueyo?

  I’m sorry.   There is something I didn’t think of some days ago, while I was looking for a simple solution to Fermat’s statement. I had just proved ( you can click here to see it ) that any triangle that has sides a, b, c the length of positive integers satisfies Fermat’s statement ( aⁿ ≠ bⁿ + cⁿ for any positive integer value of n > 2 ).   And I thought that was it… A mistake.   I mean, my proof was solid and sound; but I hadn’t finished yet.   Why? All triangles verify that each of its three sides is smaller than the sum (addition) of the other two. Let’s forget triangles from this point on. If we have three positive integers a, b, c …   One of them could be equal to the sum of the other two as in a = (b + c) . One of them could be bigger than the sum of the other two as in a > (b + c) . I need to prove that those two possibilities actually satisfy Fermat’s statement in order to have a complete, simple solution. And that’s what...

  Lo siento: se me pasó por alto. Pensaba que ya lo tenía…   Pero no.  NO DEL TODO. Acababa de demostrar en esta otra entrada de blog que el enunciado de Fermat se cumple para todos los triángulos posibles –fueran de la clase que fueran- cuyos lados tuviesen por medida números enteros positivos a, b, c (de tal manera que para valores enteros de n > 2 siempre ocurra que aⁿ ≠ bⁿ + cⁿ ).   Lo había hecho en cuatro pasos .   Y supuse que, con eso, estaba todo dicho y hecho.   Que tenía una solución completa y, lo más importante, sencilla (pues si no era sencilla, jamás hubiera podido pensarla y deducirla) del enunciado de Fermat. Pero ¡qué va! Me había dejado llevar por el entusiasmo del momento y no me di cuenta de que era necesario llegar más lejos.   Que aún me quedaba algo de trabajo por delante… Pues resulta que todos los triángulos existentes cumplen una propiedad peculiar: en cada triángulo, todos y cada uno de sus lados deben ser ...

                   French mathematician Pierre de Fermat wrote a statement around 1.637 A.D. that said “...no three positive integers a, b and c satisfy the equation a ⁿ + b ⁿ = c ⁿ for any integer value of n greater than 2” .          The exceptions are the trivial solutions (0, 1, 1) , (1, 0, 1) and (0, 0, 0) , of course.    The cases n=1 and n=2 have been known since antiquity to have infinitely many solutions (Wikipedia dixit).          Fermat didn’t write proof of his statement because, apparently, there was not enough blank space left in the page to do it .   Wait, what?          In 1995 (more than 350 years later) mathematician Andrew Wiles (with the help of his colleague Richard Taylor) proved Fermat’s statement in a published article…   The first complete, valid proof of that sta...