Book review: Fermat’s Last Theorem
-by Simon Singh
As I was setting up my charter for my reads of 2022 in early January, I looked to my connections on Goodreads for inspiration and this orange-hued book with DaVincian tones caught my eye. The title Fermat’s Last theorem rang a distant bell in a corner of the abyss of my mind. I looked up the theorem and read a brief synopsis outlined below.
Fermat’s Last Theorem, formulated in 1637, states that no 4 distinct positive integers a, b, c and n can satisfy the equation
a^{n}+b^{n}=c^{n} where n>2
While I had seen the equation before I couldn’t wrap my head around how something so simple could actually be one of the toughest problems known to mankind. Simon’s adjective of it as a great problem as one that fights back when you try to solve it is spot on and a wonderful encapsulation of the works of Cauchy, Lame, and Kummer which attempt to bridge the gap, albeit unsuccessfully so.
Singh does such a wonderfully delightful job of taking his readers on a sugarcane-dipped lovely journey transforming what could’ve easily been an arcane esoteric tome into a thrilling adventure. Rarely in the recent past and with the avalanche of daily distractions has a book been able to wrestle more clock time than the iPad. It re-ignited my passion for reading again. I couldn’t wait for the silence of nightfall to come and I’d get lost in this page-turner gleefully devouring how Pythagoras was such a genius and yet close-minded, how Fermat gleefully enjoyed trolling his contemporaries, and the tragedies of Galois and Taniyama.
He makes the erudite and frankly gibberish-looking formal mathematics accessible and digestible to us mere mortals. The way he draws parallels between Godel’s incompleteness theorem and the cataloging in the library allows me with utter confidence to state that Singh is the Fermat of literature hiding the complexity in palatable morsels.
Reading the tales of the who’s who of mathematics over the centuries taking a stab at the riddle to various degrees of success. From the marvelous anecdote about how FLT saved Wolfskehl from taking his own life to the prize he instituted and it’s rather curious T&C regarding the prize including its expiry in 100 years.
I call a book impactful if it leaves behind a desire in the reader to learn more, inspires the reader to explore the subject matter more, and leaves a smile on the reader. FLT by Simon Singh delivers on all these accounts and then some.
A big shout out to Andrew Wiles and the countless mathematicians before him to undertake the risky endeavor of proving the impossible. On to my next intellectual pursuit — ‘The universe in a nutshell’ — by none other than Stephen Hawking. Stay tuned.
