In a recent issue of New Scientist (16 Aug 2010), I was surprised to read that a part of Wiles' proof of Taniyama-Shimura conjecture relies on inaccessible cardinals.
Here's the article
- Richard Elwes, To infinity and beyond: The struggle to save arithmetic, New Scientist, August 2010.
Here's the relevant bit from the article:
"Large cardinals have been studied by logicians for a century, but their intangibility means they have seldom featured in mainstream mathematics. A notable exception is the most celebrated result of recent years, the proof of Fermat's last theorem by the British mathematician Andrew Wiles in 1994 [...] To complete his proof, Wiles assumed the existence of a type of large cardinal known as an inaccessible cardinal, technically overstepping the bounds of conventional arithmetic"
Is this true ? If so, could someone please outline how they are used ?