Possible Proof of ABC Conjecture

Posted by Unknown on Monday September 10, 2012 @10:54AM from the lord-of-the-proof dept.

submeta writes "Shinichi Mochizuki of Kyoto University has released a paper which claims to prove the decades-old ABC conjecture, which involves the relationship between prime numbers, addition, and multiplication. His solution involves thinking of numbers not as members of sets (the standard interpretation), but instead as objects which exist in 'new, conceptual universes.' As one would expect, the proof is extremely dense and difficult to understand, even for experts in the field, so it may take a while to verify. However, Mochizuki has a strong reputation, so this is likely to get attention. Proof of the conjecture could potentially lead to a revolution in number theory, including a greatly simplified proof of Fermat's Last Theorem."

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Re:Rarely much smaller than? by Garridan · 2012-09-10 11:10 · Score: 5, Informative

LMWTFY: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abc_conjecture#Formulations.
Re:Rarely much smaller than? by Gilandune · 2012-09-10 11:17 · Score: 5, Informative

That is precisely the point of the proof, to determine under which conditions the sum of 2 integers is less than the product of the prime divisors of the 3 original numbers. I hope that is less vague :P