Today is the birthday of Pierre de Fermat, and there’s a Google
Doodle to celebrate! Today’s Doodle is a chalkboard showing
Fermat’s Last Theorem, famously scribbled in the margins of
Arithmetica, with a note that the proof of the theorem didn’t
fit there — see the mouseover on the actual Doodle for a
reference to this. The theorem stated that there are no three
positive, different integers a, b, and c such that an + bn = cn
is true for any integer n greater than 2. Fermat’s claim left
mathematicians puzzled for over 350 years — as mathematicians
proved it true for many sets of possible values of n — until the
general case was finally proved by Andrew Wiles in 1995. The
story about the proof is told in Simon Singh’s book Fermat’s
Enigma: The Epic Quest to Solve the World’s Greatest
Mathematical Problem. Did Fermat really have a proof? Most
likely not, since the techniques Wiles used to prove it weren’t
developed until several centuries after Fermat’s death — and
since, in the 30 years he lived after writing t