An abc Proof Too Tough Even for Mathematicians

On August 30, 2012, a Japanese mathematician named Shinichi Mochizuki posted four papers to his faculty website at Kyoto University. Rumors had been spreading all summer that Mochizuki was onto something big, and in the abstract to the fourth paper Mochizuki explained that, indeed, his project was a...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published inThe Best Writing on Mathematics 2013 Vol. 4; pp. 225 - 230
Main Author Hartnett, Kevin
Format Book Chapter
LanguageEnglish
Published United States Princeton University Press 19.01.2014
Subjects
Discrete mathematics
Geometry
MATHEMATICS
Number theory
Numbers
Popular science
Pure mathematics
Online AccessGet full text

Cover

More Information
Summary:On August 30, 2012, a Japanese mathematician named Shinichi Mochizuki posted four papers to his faculty website at Kyoto University. Rumors had been spreading all summer that Mochizuki was onto something big, and in the abstract to the fourth paper Mochizuki explained that, indeed, his project was as grand as people had suspected. Over 512 pages of dense mathematical reasoning, he claimed to have discovered a proof of one of the most legendary unsolved problems in math. The problem is called the abc conjecture, a 27-year-old proposition considered so impossible that few mathematicians even dared to take it on. Most
ISBN:9780691160412
0691160414
DOI:10.1515/9781400847990-022