I didn't sign the Fields medallists' letter
When I was around 11 I heard for the first time about Fermat’s Last Theorem. I was immediately captivated by the problem statement, as well as by the accompanying story, and made a fairly serious attempt to prove it. And while, unsurprisingly, I failed, I learned a lot from the attempt.
- ▪When I was around 11 I heard for the first time about Fermat’s Last Theorem.
- ▪I was immediately captivated by the problem statement, as well as by the accompanying story, and made a fairly serious attempt to prove it.
- ▪And while, unsurprisingly, I failed, I learned a lot from the attempt.
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Record
| Original publisher | Gowers's Weblog |
| Canonical URL | https://gowers.wordpress.com/2026/09/17/why-i-didnt-sign-the-fields-medallists-letter/ |
| Publication time | Thu, 17 Sep 2026 08:51:51 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-17T09:23:43.144Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-17T09:23:43.144Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | -TbFK6cBc8Fu · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
When I was around 11 I heard for the first time about Fermat’s Last Theorem. I was immediately captivated by the problem statement, as well as by the accompanying story, and made a fairly serious attempt to prove it. And while, unsurprisingly, I failed, I learned a lot from the attempt. Blissfully ignorant of the fact that the case had been proved by Euler over 200 years earlier, I decided that that would be a good place to start: once I had sorted that out, I was optimistic that I would be ready to tackle the general case. Since I still couldn’t really see where to start, I decided to simplify the problem further and concentrate on successive differences of cubes, with a view to showing that such a difference could not itself be a cube.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Gowers's Weblog.
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