Discussion Main / RiddleForTheAges

Are in-universe examples allowed? As in mysteries that the audience finds out but the characters in the story don't.

The provider of the trope image is no longer an example of the trope, since there is an explanation that shows they were not intending to leave it a riddle.

I didn't really watch How I Met Your Mother so I'm not really the best judge, but the pineapple question (shown in the page image) was resolved here.

Edited by pittsburghmuggle "Freedom is not a license for chaos" -Norton Juster's The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics

I removed this example from Neon Genesis Evangelion:

• Who killed Kaji?
  • In the manga, it's clearly an unnamed agent/one-shot character.

Seems to me if there is an answer, then it isn't a Riddle for the Ages.

Let's just say and leave it at that.

This page is getting some Trope Decay. If you're reading this, don't just put any question you ever wondered about; that's what Headscratchers and WMG are for.

We're not just men of science, we're men of TROPE!

Removed:

• Fermat's riddle.
  • Well, now we got a proof to his theorem. But the mystery itself remains — who knows, whether he has one, or he wrote his note as a joke, or he has a proof, but later checked and understood he's mistaken, or ..? And if he has it, his proof was quite unlikely to be the same as new one, so... what it was, anyway?
    • Interestingly, Fermat did (sorta) prove his last theorem for n=4; Euler refined this proof into the method of infinite descent. Cauchy and Lame tried to adapt this technique, but they both made a serious mistake which led to their proofs failing for irregular primes, the smallest of which is n=37. This has led to speculation that Fermat's proof was the method of infinite descent, and he (like Cauchy and Lame, who were both mathematical geniuses) didn't realize the problem.
    • From what this troper understands, we can be sure of one thing (sort of)) — the proof we have is (probably) not the one he was talking about. If it existed. Nobody's sure there.
      • We are extremely sure that Wiles' proof of Fermat's Last Theorem could not have been known to Fermat, because Wiles's proof relies on a number of mathematical concepts that Fermat simply didn't have - among them the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture/Modularity Theorem, which Fermat couldn't even have thought about, since elliptic curves and modular forms weren't around for another 200 years after Fermat died, and Iwasawa theory (not around until the 1950s), and the Axiom of Choice (not formulated until the early 20th century).
      • Well, it would make an interesting premise for fiction to consider how his proof could have been the same as the current one.
        • Well, Netwon didn't tell anyone he invented calculus until somebody else came up with it, so him Fermat withholding entire branches of mathematics wouldn't be unprecedented.

I don't think Fermat's Theorem counts; 1) it has been solved, and 2) it is now considered unlikely that Fermat had a general proof (maybe he thought he had one, but then realized that it was incorrect). Well, and 3) it's been filling the page with natter.

I replaced it with a truly unsolvable proposition: the Continuum hypothesis.

Long live Marxism-Lennonism!