The Black Mallet :: Mathematical Pudding

by Ziya Tong     Department: Correlations

Last night I watched what could oddly be described as a moving math documentary. It's the story of Andrew Wiles, a Princeton University professor who spent seven years of his life ploughing away at one of mathematics' last great unsolved puzzles - Fermat's Last Theorem. On the surface the problem looks pretty simple:

          xⁿ + yⁿ = zⁿ

Basically, it states that n can never be an integer greater than 2 or the equation will have no solutions. But finding the definitive proof for that statement eluded even the world's top mathematicians for centuries.

Of course, that's not the kind of thing that's likely to keep me up at night. In fact, my zⁿ is more likely to mean, hit the snooze button. But Fermat's Last Theorem is a compelling film: it's got childhood dreams, an age-old puzzle, failure, success, elliptical curves and a vicarious epiphany to boot. At the end of it all your brain might feel like pudding, but at least it'll contain the proof.

Tags: Andrew Wiles, Black Mallet, Fermat, mathematics, puzzle, Ziya Tong