Claude Shannon: How a Genius Thinks, Works, and Lives

Re:Claude Shannon: How a Genius Thinks, Works, and Lives by Lordarminius on Friday July 21, 2017 @07:56PM (#14824618)

if Einstein or Shannon hadn't discovered their respective theories, someone else would have Maybe

It probably wouldn't have taken very long, either. It actually could take decades, centuries, millenia. Think of all the discoveries lost to antiquity that had to be rediscovered. Think of Eulers findings that would take decades for some othe mathematician to figure out afresh

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Re:Claude Shannon: How a Genius Thinks, Works, and Lives by amelius on Friday July 21, 2017 @09:05PM (#14824866)

Well, Fermat's last theorem is one such example. How long did it take to rediscover a proof?

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Re:Claude Shannon: How a Genius Thinks, Works, and Lives by joe_the_user on Friday July 21, 2017 @11:43PM (#14825279)

I believe the consensus among mathematicians is that Fermat either didn't have a proof or had an incorrect proof.

Any statement of the modern proof would require hundreds of pages and results not available to Fermat. So it's likely Wiles didn't rediscover the proof but simply discovered it.

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