An amusing observation, which people often argued about
on USENET news back
in the 1990s, is that Fermat's last theorem
is false in
. For example,
has a nontrivial solution, namely
,
, and
. Here
is a cube
root of
in
. Note that it takes some work to prove that there
is a cube root of
in
(see Exercise 56).
William Stein
2004-05-06