NEWS YOU CAN AFFORD TO MISS
By Anna Arutunyan

Moscow News (Russia)
August 31, 2005

Siberian Engineer Proves Fermat’s Last Theorem on TV

An engineering professor from Siberia’s Omsk, Alexander Ilyin, proved
the ever-elusive Fermat’s Theorem live before TV cameras. Last week,
NTV aired 15 minutes of the professor proving the theorem. The proof
has yet to stand up to the tests of the Russian Academy of Science,
and if it holds up, it will be published in one of the academy’s
scientific journals. Pierre de Fermat came up with the theorem in
1660. Since then, mathematicians have been struggling to prove it.
Andrew Wiles finally proved the theorem in 1994, basing his proof on
the Shimura-Taniyama-Weil Conjecture. But mathematicians from around
the world are still trying their hand.

Those Russians are always coming up with something. Couple of years
back, folks from Armenia astonished the world with their 100 percent
effective AIDS cure. Oh, wait, Armenians aren’t Russian… Still,
Lenin invented the light bulb, the steam engine, and I’ll bet he
even proved Fermat’s Last Theorem back in grade school. What, like
it’s hard? I never could figure out why Yutaka Taniyama had to get
into elliptic curves just to prove a theorem that would help prove
Fermat’s theorem. He committed suicide, by the way. So the theorem
states that the equation xn+yn=zn has no non-zero integer solutions
for x, y, and z where n > 2. What’s there to prove? Let’s have x=1,
y=2, and z=3. For n=3, you get 1+8 =27. See? That wasn’t so hard. I’d
explain further, there’s just not enough space on page 11.