SO HE WAS RIGHT AFTER ALL

Something else momentous happened last month. The earth shook beneath the house of mathematics, which was buzzing with excitement such as it had not seen for—well for more than 350 years.

After the death of one of the great mathematicians and physicists of the early 16^th century, Pierre de Fermat (1601-1665), a book by the ancient Greek mathematician Diophantos was found among his possessions. The book is a well known treatise on solutions of equations in whole numbers.

"Of this," his note continued, "I have found truly wonderful proof, which this margin is too small to contain."

For n = 1 the solution is trivial; for n = 2, the solutions are the Pythagorean numbers such as 3,4,5 (9 + 16 = 25) and for n > 2, said "Fermat's Last Theorem" or "The Great Fermat Theorem" or "Fermat's marginal note," no solution in positive integers existed.

Generations of mathematicians became obsessed with the proof. No one ever found a case proving Fermat wrong, but the proof was lacking. Various academies of Sciences offered prizes, a German nobleman who had spent his life vainly searching for the proof, left his fortune to the first to prove Fermat's Last Theorem. But none was forthcoming and gradually mathematicians began to believe that Fermat never had a valid proof.

Last month an Englishman working at Princeton, Dr. Andrew Wiles, provided it. It is enormously long and needs many years of training in a special type of mathematics, but the wonderful thing about it is that he did it (unlike the "proof" of the four-color theorem) without the brute force of a computer.

There is still room for human ingenuity in a world where it is considered knowledge to know which button to press on a computer and where "to create" is used for "to create a file."

As a physicist, Fermat was mainly known for discovery of Fermat's principle, according to which a ray of light will always propagate in such a way as to get from one point to another in the shortest possible time. The laws of reflection and retraction are special cases of this principle.