POEM + DISCOVERY
Three mathematicians at the private summit of discovery: Gödel, Newton, and Wiles, each briefly the first person to know something extraordinary.
AUTHOR NARRATION
Read by A.F. King in the original English.
THE THREE NAMES
/media/kurt-isaac-andrew/kurt-godel.jpgAssociated here with the incompleteness theorems.
/media/kurt-isaac-andrew/isaac-newton.jpgAssociated here with the development of calculus.
/media/kurt-isaac-andrew/andrew-wiles.jpgAssociated here with the proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem.
MOMENTS OF KNOWING
Add a concise account of Newton’s development of the methods that became differential and integral calculus.
Add a compact account of what the incompleteness theorems changed about formal mathematics.
Add a concise account of the long effort culminating in Wiles’s proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem.
THREE VISUAL EXPLAINERS
A compact, visual explanation of incompleteness: what a sufficiently expressive formal system cannot fully prove about itself.
A visual explanation of calculus through change, slope, accumulation, or the relationship between differentiation and integration.
A visual explanation of Fermat’s Last Theorem and why proving it required far more than checking examples.
ELSEWHERE IN THE COLLECTION
A comic companion poem about the famous margin note and the gap between claimed proof and available space.
Open the related poem →READER DISCUSSION
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