Timeline for The product of n radii in an ellipse
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
9 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Nov 7, 2023 at 17:47 | history | edited | Peter Humphries | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Jun 27, 2010 at 21:07 | vote | accept | Craig Feinstein | ||
| Jun 27, 2010 at 21:07 | comment | added | Craig Feinstein | You all figured it out. Congratulations! I was actually hoping someone would give a different answer than quoting Wiles and Taylor's theorem. Notice that the points on the ellipse that intersect the rays generate a subfield of the complex numbers if their product equals one. And if a and b are rational, only two if n is odd (or four if n is even) of the points on the ellipse have rational coordinates. Is it possible to use this fact to generate a contradiction and prove FLT? | |
| Jun 26, 2010 at 16:51 | comment | added | Kevin Buzzard | And they said FLT was a useless result ;-) | |
| Jun 26, 2010 at 16:22 | comment | added | Qiaochu Yuan | I was duped! +1 all around. | |
| Jun 26, 2010 at 16:20 | comment | added | David E Speyer | Thanks for the typo fix. Yeah, I can't imagine coming up with this by accident. | |
| Jun 26, 2010 at 16:20 | history | edited | David E Speyer | CC BY-SA 2.5 |
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| Jun 26, 2010 at 16:10 | comment | added | Kevin Buzzard | Nice one David. Conjecture: the OP knew the question was equivalent to FLT! | |
| Jun 26, 2010 at 14:40 | history | answered | David E Speyer | CC BY-SA 2.5 |