> Apparently, when someone asked David Hilbert why he didn't prove Fermat's
> Last Theorem and win the Wolfskehl Prize, he remarked: "Why should I kill
> the goose that lays the golden egg?" Is this another instance of the myth
> transmission in the History of Mathematics? If not, I'd appreciate very
> much a primary reference to the source (and context) of this statement.
D. Hilbert spoke about FLT (but not proverbialy!) in his famous lecture
in ICM at Paris in 1900:
<q>
Fermat had asserted, as is well known, that the diophantine equation
x^n + y^n = z^n (x,y and z integers) is unsolvable - except in certain
self evident cases. The attempt to prove this impossibility offers a
striking example of the inspiring effect which such a very special and
apparently unimportant problem may have upon science. For Kummer, incited
by Fermat's problem, was led to the introduction of ideal numbers and to
the discovery of the law of the unique decomposition of the numbers of a
circular field into ideal prime factors - a law which to-day, in its
generalization to any algebraic field by Dedekind and Kronecker, stands at
the center of the modern theory of numbers and whose significance extends
far beyond the boundaries of number theory into the realm of algebra and
the theory of functions.
</q>
David Hilbert: Mathematical Problems. Trans. Mary Newson.
Bulletin of the AMS 8(1902) 437 - 8
Quoted in:
David Wells: The Penguin Book of Curious and Interesting Mathematics.
Penguin Books, 1997, p. 207
Note: A Greek mathematician and writer (Apostolos Doxiades) in his
fiction story: _The Uncle Peter and the Conjecture of Goldbach_ (in Greek)
mentions the version: Riemann Hypothesis instead of FLT (in p. 87 of
his book, with ISBN 960-03-1011-4)
Antreas