Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/A-class rating/Fermat's last theorem

Fermat's last theorem

 * The following discussion is archived. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section.

The consensus is to remove the A-class rating. &mdash; Carl (CBM · talk) 03:04, 19 June 2007 (UTC)

review Nominated by: Geometry guy 18:26, 11 June 2007 (UTC)

I've been going through the articles which were assessed as A-Class before this review process was instigated, checking if they still meet the standard. This one caught my eye, because in September 2006, it was listed as a candidate for Mathematics Collaboration of the Week with the comment "The history of this conundrum is really fascinating, but the article hardly does it justice". It doesn't meet the criteria for MATHCOTM collaboration, so I removed it from the list, but it may be worthy of an A-Class Review.

It was listed as A-Class in October 2006, although there were no substantial changes since September. There have not been many changes since then: a little more on early attempts at the proof, some additional references, and more pop-culture.

It is surely close to A-Class (unless we are going to worry about citation and WP:SCG), but I wonder if it has really nailed it on the completeness front: there are opportunities here to add more mathematical content (rather than history and pop-culture). For instance, the contributions of Germain and Kummer could be expanded: the latter in particular inspired the development of ring theory, ideals, and the ideal class group. And surely more could be said about the proof — perhaps we should separate the proof from the history of the proof. At present the text seems to imply that Wiles proved the Taniyama–Shimura conjecture &mdash; whereas my understanding is that he only proved a special case (which was sufficient for FLT) &mdash; and links with the Langlands program go unmentioned.

So I think it might benefit from the keen eye (and keyboard) of a few project members! Geometry guy 19:12, 11 June 2007 (UTC)

PS. It is currently listed as Bplus-Class, but this is partly an accident: the page was moved from "Fermat's Last Theorem", but the Comments weren't, so I thought the rating was unsigned, and didn't feel confident to sign it off as A-Class, so I downgraded it to Bplus. In other words, this is more of a review than a promotion question.
 * PPS. It has now been reassessed as B-Class by Arcfrk, suggesting it needs our attention even more! Geometry guy 09:13, 12 June 2007 (UTC)


 * I agree that the article could use more content about the actual mathematics of the proof and related areas. Unfortunately this will take some time to do correctly, and a strong knowledge of number theory to do well, as people have noted on the article talk page. It might be worth canvassing some number theorists, and maybe hanging an outline on the article to give people easy places to put in a little time. I would guess that most of the claims about the history were taken from one of the popularizations listed at the end. &mdash; Carl (CBM · talk) 14:24, 12 June 2007 (UTC)
 * I presume most of this was taken from Singh, and that's why he's a Reference. Most of the history looks good; but someone should check that it's from Singh, and so indicate in the references. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 02:26, 15 June 2007 (UTC)

I have to say the writing in this article is truly atrocious. I'll help a bit, but this really needs a whole overhaul, mathematical issues aside. --C S (Talk) 02:58, 14 June 2007 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section.