The Shortest Ever Papers - Numberphile
Audible 30-day free trial: http://www.audible.com/numberphile (sponsor) Tony Padilla discusses some of the shortest math papers to be published. From Conway to Nash. More links & stuff in full...
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[Tony]: I thought we'd have a look at some of the shortest papers that have ever been written. One of the sort of most famous ones was this one here by Lander and Parkin. Which you can literally see, look how short it is! There's virtually nothing there. But the content's really good because it actually disproves a very long-standing conjecture that had held for hundreds of years. [Brady]: So now we're just disproving with an actual example? [Tony]: Exactly, they were just proving the Euler conjecture, and what is the Euler conjecture? Well it's kind of related to Fermat's Last Theorem. Fermat's theorem, what does it say? You've got two numbers, a1 to the k plus a2 to the k equals b to the k. And basically it says there...
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[Tony]: I thought we'd have a look at some of the shortest papers that have ever been written. One of the sort of most famous ones was this one here by Lander and Parkin. Which you can literally see, look how short it is! There's virtually nothing there. But the content's really good because it actually disproves a very long-standing conjecture that had held for hundreds of years. [Brady]: So now we're just disproving with an actual example? [Tony]: Exactly, they were just proving the Euler conjecture, and what is the Euler conjecture? Well it's kind of related to Fermat's Last Theorem. Fermat's theorem, what does it say? You've got two numbers, a1 to the k plus a2 to the k equals b to the k. And basically it says there...
