Re: [math-fun] math, existence, and God

On Tue, Jul 14, 2009 at 5:35 PM, Dan Asimov <dasimov@earthlink.net> wrote:

No, they weren't.

If FLT had turned out to be false, it would have been provably false, by just doing the arithmetic for a counterexample.

But it was (until Wiles' proof, of course) possible that FTL was impossible to prove. It's just that if it were impossible to prove, it would also be impossible to prove that it was impossible to prove, since a proof that it was impossible to prove would constitute a proof that it was true, from your logic above. Andy