And then I mailed it off without completing my sentence. I was going to
point out that for 20+ years, from the 70's to the 90's, people used a
theorem called the "tamahock-yamorra" (gotta love phonetic spelling)
without proof. It looked good, but most mathematicians simply said "I have
*NO IDEA* how to prove this. It was proved in the early ninties, and
incindently, a corollary from it proves Fermat's Last Theorem. They say
the proof is really only understood by one person: the guy who wrote it.
It's about 200 pages, and most of it is entirely new math, which he had to
*invent* in order to establish his result.
ERiC