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@wrog@mastodon.murkworks.net
@littmath@mathstodon.xyz Moreover, in any context where you're actually having to write out a proof of Fermat's Little Theorem, it is very likely this work hasn't been done yet. An honest version of t
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@littmath@mathstodon.xyz LLMs have no clue about this stuff -- and even there, I'm anthropomorphising too much in suggesting there's "anything" there to "have a clue". All we really have here is sophi
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@littmath@mathstodon.xyz Or will it be "a library filled with statements of ZFC that **appear** to be true, are confidently **asserted** to be true, and, if we're lucky, 'proved' by references to othe
Bluesky user? Read http:// mastodon.murkworks.net/@wrog/1 15830246587842492 genuine Internet Old Fart (you under 40 ⟹ I have email older than you). professional clueless, middle-aged white guy. He/him. Former Dem.party-hack. Math/CS degrees + physics courses. Music theorist by marriage. Former MSFT. Seattle area; orig.from NJ. # LambdaMOO # perl # scheme # AlgebraicTopology # concurrency # Princeton # Cambridge # Stanford # autism # AbsolutePitch # RomanHistory # BoardGames # atheist # piano # microtonal
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Bluesky user? Read http:// mastodon.murkworks.net/@wrog/1 15830246587842492 genuine Internet Old Fart (you under 40 ⟹ I have email older than you). professional clueless, middle-aged white guy. He/him. Former Dem.party-hack. Math/CS degrees + physics courses. Music theorist by marriage. Former MSFT. Seattle area; orig.from NJ. # LambdaMOO # perl # scheme # AlgebraicTopology # concurrency # Princeton # Cambridge # Stanford # autism # AbsolutePitch # RomanHistory # BoardGames # atheist # piano # microtonal
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@wrog@mastodon.murkworks.net
·
Feb 23, 2026
@littmath@mathstodon.xyz
Never mind that if you follow this method of proving Fermat's Little Theorem, you completely miss the (imho) far more informative/illuminating proof,
the one in which you establish that multiplication mod p is invertible when p is prime, therefore the multiplicative side of Z/(p) is a finite group and so everything there has order dividing the order of the group (p-1).
thereby actually learning something about the connections between group theory and number theory rather than being stuck proving an obscure fact about the divisibility of (n choose k)
(and perhaps this is unfair of me, but if one is going to be touting this as The Future of Mathematics, I'd just as soon be clear about what we stand to lose...)
7/7
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