Fermat's Last Theorem Read Free

different. One Cambridge researchstudent was so convinced that it was true that he dashed to the bookies to bet £10 that Fermat’s Last Theorem would be solved within the week. However, the bookie smelt a rat and refused to accept his wager. This was the fifth student to have approached him that day, all of them asking to place the identical bet. Fermat’s Last Theorem had baffled the greatest minds on the planet for over three centuries, but now even bookmakers were beginning to suspect that it was on the verge of being proved.
    The three blackboards became filled with calculations and the lecturer paused. The first board was erased and the algebra continued. Each line of mathematics appeared to be one tiny step closer to the solution, but after thirty minutes the lecturer had still not announced the proof. The professors crammed into the front rows waited eagerly for the conclusion. The students standing at the back looked to their seniors for hints of what the conclusion might be. Were they watching a complete proof to Fermat’s Last Theorem, or was the lecturer merely outlining an incomplete and anticlimactic argument?
    The lecturer was Andrew Wiles, a reserved Englishman who had emigrated to America in the 1980s and taken up a professorship at Princeton University where he had earned a reputation as one of the most talented mathematicians of his generation. However, in recent years he had almost vanished from the annual round of conferences and seminars, and colleagues had begun to assume that Wiles was finished. It is not unusual for brilliant young minds to burn out, a point noted by the mathematician Alfred Adler: ‘The mathematical life of a mathematician is short. Work rarely improves after the age of twenty-five or thirty. If little has been accomplished by then, little will ever be accomplished.’
    â€˜Young men should prove theorems, old men should write books,’ observed G.H. Hardy in his book
A Mathematician’s Apology.
‘No mathematician should ever forget that mathematics, more than any other art or science, is a young man’s game. To take a simple illustration, the average age of election to the Royal Society is lowest in mathematics.’ His own most brilliant student Srinivasa Ramanujan was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society at the age of just thirty-one, having made a series of outstanding breakthroughs during his youth. Despite having received very little formal education in his home village of Kumbakonam in South India, Ramanujan was able to create theorems and solutions which had evaded mathematicians in the West. In mathematics the experience that comes with age seems less important than the intuition and daring of youth. When he posted his results to Hardy, the Cambridge professor was so impressed that he invited him to abandon his job as a lowly clerk in South India and attend Trinity College, where he could interact with some of the world’s foremost number theorists. Sadly the harsh East Anglian winters were too much for Ramanujan who contracted tuberculosis and died at the age of thirty-three.
    Other mathematicians have had equally brilliant but short careers. The nineteenth-century Norwegian Niels Henrik Abel made his greatest contribution to mathematics at the age of nineteen and died in poverty, just eight years later, also of tuberculosis. Charles Hermite said of him, ‘He has left mathematicians something to keep them busy for five hundred years’, and it is certainly true that Abel’s discoveries still have a profound influence on today’s number theorists. Abel’s equally gifted contemporary Evariste Galois also made his breakthroughs while still a teenager and then died aged just twenty-one.
    These examples are not intended to show that mathematicians die prematurely and tragically but rather that their most profound ideas are generally conceived while they are young, and as Hardyonce said, ‘I do not know an