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Chen guanrong

From 65438 to 0995, Andrew John wiles, an English professor at Princeton University, was famous for proving the famous Fermat conjecture. 1637, Pierre de Fermat, a French professional lawyer and amateur mathematician, wrote a short note next to the eighth proposition in volume 1 1 when reading the Latin translation of Alexandrian Diophantine's Arithmetic, saying that the equation has no nonzero integer solution for all. Unfortunately, the blank space of his book is too small to write down his "a wonderful proof", leaving fascinating doubts.

Andrew John wiles

For more than 300 years, many mathematicians around the world have made many efforts to prove that Fermat's conjecture is correct, but all in vain. In this wonderful math relay race, Wells ran to the finish line first, and naturally won many awards. In addition to the Fields Medal of 1998, another famous award is the prize of 65,438+million marks (the face value at that time was about equal to the present 1 10,000 pounds) set up by German Paul Wolfskeil.

Paul Wolfskeil

Speaking of this Wolfsk, many people really don't know who he is. The son of the darmstadt-born banker studied mathematics in university. He later became famous in the industry and fell madly in love with a beautiful girl. However, to his dismay, his courtship was repeatedly rejected. He finally fell in love, so he decided to commit suicide and chose a good day to bid farewell to this heartless world when the church bell rang at midnight.

It is said that women will cry when they want to commit suicide. Men drink a lot of alcohol when they want to commit suicide, which will be very painful. Wolfsk is different. In the following days, he worked hard every day as if nothing had happened, except writing his will, until the day when he was scheduled to commit suicide. That night, seeing that there were still a few hours before midnight, he ran to the library and read some math books and periodicals that he usually liked to browse to kill the rest of the time. However, he was unconsciously attracted by an article by Eduard Kummer, which explained why even famous mathematicians such as Augustin-Louis Cauchy could not prove Fermat's conjecture. Interestingly, Wolfsk actually found an imprecise place in Kumar's argument. He thought, I'll make it up. So he negotiated until dawn and finally completed the work of replenishing the certificate. At that time, he was overjoyed, full of Fermat, and decided not to commit suicide. Instead, he revised his newly written will and set up an award for the large fortune he left in the future to reward the first person who completed Fermat's conjecture.

Of course, Wolfsk didn't know. Later, due to the world war and other reasons, his legacy to Wells was only about 30,000 pounds.