If it so happened, then else in 1847, these very “Complex numbers” had to be solemnly buried with all the honors. But with this matter somehow did not work out at all and the restless souls of the long-dead theories turn out to be so tenacious that they cannot be expelled from textbooks and professorial lectures by any means. They will wander through different books and reference books whose authors will be completely unaware of how much their works depreciates from this useless ballast.
In the mentioned book of Singh is well shown as the ambiguity of decomposing compound integers into prime factors makes it impossible to construct logical conclusions in proofs and it also was said that the unambiguity theorem for such a decomposing for natural numbers was given in “Euclidean Elements”. The specific book and location of the theorem is not specified; therefore, it is rather difficult to find the necessary text, but it really turned out to be so.18
“Euclidean Elements" is a very old book with archaic terminology, in which this extremely important for science theorem was somehow lost and it was simply forgotten about it. The first to discover the loss was Gauss. He formulated it again and gave proof, which contained a surprisingly simple and even childish error, where as an argument used exactly what needs to be proven (see pt. 3.3.1).
But this is not an ordinary theorem, all science holds on it! And what about Euclid? Oh my God! In fact, his proof is the same as that of Gauss i.e. wrong!!! Tell it to someone, so they will not believe! Three giants of science are stumbled on the same place!
Pic. 25. Euclid
Then it turns out that this whole science is fake and now, thanks to Singh’s book and despite all the good intentions of its author, this terrifying FLT, which now even in theory has become completely unprovable, was so furious that like a true monster, in one fell swoop have devalued all the age-old works of scientists! And yet they live in not fabulous, but in the real kingdom of crooked mirrors, what about they themselves don’t know anything.
The fiasco being by academicians Cauchy and Lame did not result in the rejection use of the surrogates of numbers in science especially after Kummer who had crushed their works, found a way to prove FLT (with a little modernization) for any particular case. Before the final victory over the FLT only a last step remained – to obtain a single common proof. Since then 170 years have passed, but nothing was changed. Supported in due time by the Euler's genius "complex numbers" are still presented today as a kind of extension the notion of number. This looks very impressive and solid, but still requires a clear definition of the very notion of number, however just with this deal are very bad.
Students intuitively feeling that they are being tortured in vain by nonsenses about some non-existent numbers, suddenly have a question: “What is a number?” They never come to mind that not a single professor could not answer this question even if he has reread everything that is in mathematics. One of them even could not bear the mocking hints and had published a whole book called “What is a number?” [13, 29]. In it, he has written so many whatnots that students have very well understood – such a question it’s better not to ask.
Pic. 26. Francis Viète
Meanwhile, scientists continued to move science forward, not bothering with such trifles as the essence of the notion of number. So, they created a whole bunch of new algebras taking advantage of the fact that there were no obstacles along the way. But they were not a continuation of what was a real one, the founder of which was the first royal mathematician François Viète served as an advisor to the court of the French king Henry III. But if these new algebras are special, then their terminology and bases are also special.
So, little by little in the science began to form a particular bird language understandable only to the authors of these most innovative developments. It even reached the point where mathematical societies creating a science only for themselves began to appear and in addition to this, the newest numbers appeared out of nothing: “hypercomplex”, “quaternions”, “octonions” etc. But the impression from the new achievements sometimes was spoiled from the same mare tail,19 which from somewhere appeared again. Getting this tail in the face is not very pleasant, but this is already the costs of a profession. In an effort to get away from such costs, a brilliant way out of the difficulties with the definition the essence the notion of a number was found. Scientists have finally grasped that it needs to be derived from other simpler notions, for example, such as the notion “set”. Everything turned out so simple, a set is that what is a lot. Well, is it not clear? However, it was found out again that one cannot do without empty set and in this case, it would see like nothing, and the question again arises, so what is a set number or not?
Georg Cantor has developed his theory of sets, which other mathematicians such as, for example, Henri Poincaré, called all sorts of bad words and did not want to admit at all. But suddenly unexpected for everyone the respectable "Royal Society of London" (the English Academy of Sciences) in 1904 decided to award Cantor with its medal. So, it turns out that here is the point, where the fates of science are decided!20
Pic. 27. Georg Cantor
And everything would be fine, but suddenly another trouble struck again. Out of nowhere in this very theory of sets insurmountable contradictions began to appear, which are also described in great detail in Singh’s book. In the scientific community everyone immediately was alarmed and began to think about how to solve this problem. But it has rested as on the wall and in no way did not want to be solved. Everyone was somehow depressed, but then they yet cheered up again.
It was so happened because now David Hilbert himself got down to it, the great mathematician that first solved the very difficult Waring problem, which has a direct relationship to the FLT. 21 It is also curious that Hilbert repeated Euler's experiment apparently inspired by the FLT problem. It seems that at some point Euler began to have doubts that the FLT is generally provable and he assumed the equation a4+b4+c4=d4 also like Fermat’s equation an+bn=cn for n>2 in integers is unsolvable, but in the end it turned out that he was wrong.22
Pic. 28. David Hilbert
Following the example of Euler on the eve of the 20th century, Hilbert offered to the scientific community 23 problems, which according to his assumption, are unlikely to be solved in the foreseeable future. Nevertheless, Hilbert's colleagues coped with them rather quickly, while Euler’s hypothesis has held almost until the 21st century and was only refuted with the help of computers, what is also described in Singh’s book. So, the suspicion that the FLT was merely an assumption of its author has lost any reason.
