@Nomen-Nonatur said in #36:
> A lot of nominally bigger mathematical geniuses (Euler, Gauss, Lagrange, Legendre, Dedekind,
> Dirichlet, ...) put in a lot less effort in solving this particular problem (and/or were maybe less
> fascinated by it) and failed.
As a follow-up: Gauss wrote (in a letter from 1816) to Heinrich Olbert he had looked into Fermats Last Theorem and thought it was pointless, because he could come up easily with a lot of (essentially pointless) problems which are equally impossible to prove or disprove.
In fact, the really important part of Andrew Wiles' work was not to solve FLT, but to finally prove the Taniyama-Shimura-conjecture, which suggested a homology between modular functions and elliptic curves. So, it is possible to prove something for i.e. elliptic curves (which might be relatively easy there) and have at the same time proven something about modular functions, which might have been close to impossible directly.
> A lot of nominally bigger mathematical geniuses (Euler, Gauss, Lagrange, Legendre, Dedekind,
> Dirichlet, ...) put in a lot less effort in solving this particular problem (and/or were maybe less
> fascinated by it) and failed.
As a follow-up: Gauss wrote (in a letter from 1816) to Heinrich Olbert he had looked into Fermats Last Theorem and thought it was pointless, because he could come up easily with a lot of (essentially pointless) problems which are equally impossible to prove or disprove.
In fact, the really important part of Andrew Wiles' work was not to solve FLT, but to finally prove the Taniyama-Shimura-conjecture, which suggested a homology between modular functions and elliptic curves. So, it is possible to prove something for i.e. elliptic curves (which might be relatively easy there) and have at the same time proven something about modular functions, which might have been close to impossible directly.
