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Article: The last laugh. (Pierre de Fermat's "last theorem" )
- Article from:
- The Economist (US)
- Article date:
- March 19, 1988
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1988 Economist Newspaper Ltd. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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THE biggest tease in the history of mathematics is a comment written by a seventeenth-century French judge in the margin of a third-century Greek text. Pierre de Fermat, a mathematical genius who published nothing in his lifetime, liked to set problems for other mathematicians. All except one of them have since been solved. But Fermat's so-called "last theorem", scribbled in his copy of Diophantus's Arithmetica, still prompts more loony letters to famous mathematicians than any other puzzle. Fermat wrote that he had a wonderful" proof of his theorem but that the margin was too small to contain it-an irresistible lure.
Rumour has it that a proof has at last been ...