This one's for you, Willie.

[fflo]

MR1784555 (2001k:11041)
Baica, Malvina(1-WIW)
Baica's Euclidean solution of Fermat's last theorem (FLT). (English summary)
Ital. J. Pure Appl. Math. No. 7 (2000), 151--156.
11D41

Spike Milligan wrote of a certain poet that he tortured the English language, yet had still not managed to get it to reveal its meaning. Trying to fathom the paper under review is similarly frustrating. The reviewer has read through the paper several times, and on each occasion has become more and more confused. There seems to be a plaintive argument that Baica's general Euclidean algorithm can be used to prove Fermat's last theorem, but since all the primary references are to previous papers of the author, and no coherent mathematical details are provided, this reader at least remains totally unconvinced.

Reviewed by Andrew Bremner

Comments

[disclaimerwill.livejournal.com]

Heh- squeezes a lot of information into one paragraph, don't it?

I do like the female pronoun for God. I did that in a bunch of the meeting minutes at the Eastern Agency on Aging (not for God, but just in general: "If any of our clients decides she is unhappy...") and I think it really irritated a lot of the macho old guys on the Board. Which was a tiny pleasure for me.

[fflo.livejournal.com]

ha! I bet.

This weekend dreampower (that's CKS from BibServ) was saying she used to deliberately throw the wrong-gendered pronoun into conversation, back when she lived in Arkansas, just to watch people squirm. Did it if somebody was being super-gendery, I believe she said. Seems like a fun game. Just refer to the (I'm thinking) macho guy as "she", quite casually---"You know, what she said reminds me of a time..." -- !

The author of the paper cited above later says something, after saying that physicists of course are gonna think physics is the nature of everything, about how if the world is made up of numbers then God could turn out to be a mathematician. That ol' "God's like me!" imperative/fantasy.

[disclaimerwill.livejournal.com]

Hee! That reminds me of the one Arrested Development where the gay secretary keeps referring to his homophobic boss (Henry Winkler) by saying, "She's not in," and then holding up a tape recorder and threatening to sue when Henry gets upset.

I miss Arrested Development only slightly less than I miss MR, incidentally.

Ah, the ol' "God's like me!" fantasy, indeed. Well, lucky you! (I recognize that, on one level, everyone who believes in God sort of has to believe that, because it's difficult to conceive of a being that your frame of reference can't conceive of... But still, is it that hard to add an asterisk with the phrase "I might be wrong" to your idea of what God might be?)

[fflo.livejournal.com]

is it that hard to add an asterisk with the phrase "I might be wrong" to your idea of what God might be?

It does seem to be, for so many of the Godly! [cf. hopelessness about world peace above]

p.s.

[fflo.livejournal.com]

I need to go back to the discs of Arrested Development. I think I saw the first season, perhaps before any more was out. Though I guess there wasn't all that much more, was there.

Re: p.s.

[disclaimerwill.livejournal.com]

Ooh- you've missed a lot of great stuff! (A season and a half of additional great stuff, that is.) I think there were, like, 53 episodes total, and I think there was maybe one I didn't laugh at. It's definitely worth your time. Probably twice, if you consider the Charlize Theron story arc in season three, which is doubly funny the second time around.