Thomas Callister Hales

And so here's about the one for Fermat's Law Theorem.

So first of all, to set the stage for this, um, There was this famous project of Tom Hales, a Pitt mathematician, who completed a proof of the Kepler conjecture.

Again, I say completed.

Building on the work of others, he finished and he proved the Kepler conjecture, this thing about stacking spheres in space.

Yeah, and a great example of that was the, um, uh, Kepler's conjecture.

So when Thomas Hales, you know, he, he did hundreds of thousands of dynamic programming problems, and the annals of mathematics couldn't verify whether it had actually solved the problem or not.

But, um, it was a, it was not very nice from, from a sort of...

It, it wasn't very intellectually satisfying.

So when did they finally solve it?

It wasn't until 1998 that a mathematician named Thomas Hales managed to prove the 3D version.

And it required massive computer assistance to brute force check all the possibilities.

And the proof was so incredibly complex that it took another 16 years until 2014 for a specialized computer program to formally verify that the 1998 proof was completely error-free.