Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

high-time

2021-12-30 View on smbc-comics.com → 1 revision
high-time
Votey panel for high-time
This explanation is incomplete or may contain errors. It was generated by AI and has not yet been reviewed by a human editor.

Explanation

This comic shows a politician passionately ranting at a podium.

The politician declares: "I don't care what some Frenchman says! There DOES exist an a, b, and c that satisfy a^n + b^n = c^n for an integer n greater than 2, and it's HIGH TIME the fatcats at the Capitol realized it!"

The caption reads: "How come politicians come out against logic and statistics all the time, but never number theory?"

The "Frenchman" referenced is Pierre de Fermat, and the equation is Fermat's Last Theorem, which states that no three positive integers a, b, and c can satisfy the equation a^n + b^n = c^n for any integer value of n greater than 2. This was famously proven true by Andrew Wiles in 1995 (Wiles is British, but Fermat was French).

The joke is that politicians frequently deny or argue against well-established scientific and statistical findings (climate change, evolution, etc.), but nobody has yet decided to campaign against proven mathematical theorems. The comic imagines what it would look like if populist anti-intellectualism extended to pure mathematics -- a politician railing against Fermat's Last Theorem as if it were an elitist conspiracy. The absurdity highlights how arbitrary the targets of anti-science rhetoric can be.

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