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Author: superluser
Aug 4th 2011
at
8:55:11 PM
The urban legend in question really did happen at least once, to [[http://www.snopes.com/college/homework/unsolvable.asp George Dantzig]], though it frequently gets exaggerated. As to Fermat's Last Theorem, I don't know if anyone ever thought it was unsolvable (many proofs of the theorem had existed for specific exponents), but it was commonly believed up until it was proven (at which point it was pretty much universally believed) that Fermat's assertion that he had "discovered a truly marvelous proof of this, which this margin is too narrow to contain" was a BlatantLie. The general proof takes over 100 pages.
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