How It Took Mathematicians 358 Years to Prove Fermat’s Theorem
And how Fermat took revenge.
Have you ever heard of Fermat’s Last Theorem (1637)? It’s really very simple.
It states that there are no three positive integers that satisfy the equation
for n larger than 2. As simple as it looks, it is extremely hard to prove.
So hard that it took mathematicians 358 years.
Who is our math hero? English mathematician Sir Andrew John Wiles presented his first proof in June 1993 at a conference after spending eight years in his attic office.
But there was a flaw in his proof. It took Sir Andrew yet another year to mend it. The final result was published in Annals of Mathematics and is 109 pages long.
Sir Andrew is one of the most brilliant mathematicians of our time.
What prize would you expect him to receive for such an extraordinary achievement? The Nobel Prize, I guess.
But there’s no Nobel Prize in mathematics. Rumor has it Alfred Nobel’s mistress or girlfriend was cheating on him with a mathematician. Understandably, he refused to establish such a prize for mathematics. Or maybe he just did not attach too much importance to this discipline?
