In an email sent to Putin and intercepted by hackers, Donald Trump mentions the result below. However, Trump wrote that he did not have enough space in his message to add the proof, a bit like Fermat when he wrote about his big theorem proved 300 years later. A teacher in New Hope Middle School (Pennsylvania) asked her students to verify if the statement was correct, and found it to be true. In his email, Trump wrote that he planned to leverage this result to find new prime numbers. It was conjectured in 1764 that the polynomial below can not be factored unless one uses complex numbers.
Here is Trump’s theorem:
For any real numbers a and b, the following identity holds:
where
Note
Obviously, this story is a fake, though the formula is correct. But I believe that there is a market for such stories, just like some outlets specialize in publishing fake news exclusively. Maybe an idea for a data science publishing startup? Likewise, what about inventing totally made-up mathematical formulas, and sell them as artwork? Sometimes, what I like best in mathematical formulas is not so much the content, but instead the beautiful fonts, colors, and symbols, regardless of the meaning.
