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Fermat and his Last Theorem
Here are a few notable facts about Pierre Fermat, the mathematician who first put forward the theorem that became famous under the name of Fermat's Last Theorem. 1. It's called the LAST theorem, not because it was the last one he thought of, but because, of the theorems that Fermat asserted but left unproved, it was the last one that still did not have a proof. 2. The number of attempts to prove Fermat's Last Theorem ran into thousands, before it was finally proved by the Cambridge mathematician, Andrew Wiles. 3. Many obscure schoolmasters and even students attempted to win instant fame by finding the proof that had eluded the greatest minds. 4. One reason why so many people thought they could have a go is because the theorem seems relatively simple on the face of it. 5. Fermat himself is partly to blame for this, because he wrote the statement of the theorem in the margin of his copy of a maths textbook by the Greek mathematician Diophantes, and then famously wrote, "I have found a truly remarkable proof of this theorem, but this margin is too small to contain it." 6. Whatever Fermat's proof was, it could not have been anything like the one that Wiles finally gave, since that one used techniques which were not invented until the 19th century, 200 years after Fermat lived. 7. Opinion is divided over whether Fermat was entirely honest about his assertion, or whether he was cheating, or his proof was actually flawed like the thousands of others which followed it. Some of the flaws in these proofs were very difficult to detect. 8. We will never know the truth. But if Fermat was only being mischievous, it was an amazingly good hoax, to keep everyone scratching their heads for almost three centuries. It is a fact though, that Fermat was one of the great geniuses of maths, who did prove many theorems, notably in the Theory of Numbers. 9. Fermat never attended university, and was never awarded a chair. He spent his entire life in his native Toulouse and never travelled. Much of his original work took the form of correspondence with other famous mathematicians of the day. The rest was found among his personal papers when he died. He never changed his job, which was as a minor civil servant. 10. For the record, without getting too technical, everyone in school knows the Pythagoras theorem, Xsquared+Ysquared=Zsquared and we know that it's possible to find numbers to replace X, Y, and Z that make it true, these are called solutions. One possible set of numbers is 3, 4, and 5. Now this Pythagoras theorem is an equation of the second power, that means that squared is written as a 2 in the corner, a superscript 2. OK so far? Well, Fermat's last theorem states that there is NO solution, there are NO numbers which make the equation true, when the power is 3 or greater. So it's essentially an extension of the celebrated Pythagoras theorem. |
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