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I just finished reading Fermat's Enigma by Simon Singh and it is a fantastic book. For those who don't know (most of the world), Pierre de Fermat was an amateur mathematician of the seventeenth century who wrote the famous (to a small portion of the world) line on the page of a book, "I have discovered a truly marvelous demonstration of this proposition which this margin is too narrow to contain." He claimed to have a proof of a great mathematical problem, but no one has ever discovered what that proof was. For 350 years, mathematicians around the world tried to recreate a proof of Fermat's "last theorem," as it was called, and failed. But in 1994, Andrew Wiles wrote a 130 page proof, thus solving the world's greatest mathematical problem.
That synopsis is not what sucked me into this book. No, what got me was the incredible history of the world's greatest mathematical problem (dating all the way back to Pythagoras) and the simplicity of the problem itself. Singh, the author, points out that it is so simple that a child can understand it but so difficult to prove that it took 350 years to finally pin it down. This book is absolutely loaded with some of the greatest true stories I have ever read.
It's been a long time since I read a book for pleasure, cover to cover. I usually have my nose in a textbook. But really, Fermat's Enigma was beautiful from start to finish and very difficult to put down. Here is one of many great quotes from the book, this one from Ian Stewart:
"An astronomer, a physicist, and a mathematician (it is said) were holidaying in Scotland. Glancing from a train window, they observed a black sheep in the middle of a field. 'How interesting,' observed the astronomer, 'all Scottish sheep are black!' To which the physicist responded, 'No, no! Some Scottish sheep are black!' The mathematician gazed heavenward in supplication, and then intoned, 'In Scotland there exists at least one field, containing at least one sheep, at least one side of which is black.'"
And here's a limerick someone wrote in celebration of Wiles's proof, as quoted from Singh's book:
"My butter, garçon, is writ large in!"
A diner was heard to be chargin',
"I had to write there,"
Exclaimed waiter Pierre,
"I couldn't find room in the margarine."
If you're not a mathematician, don't let that keep you from reading this book. It's not written for mathematicians. And if you're thinking of reading it, just do so.
And so proves how your brain is different than mine. Or as Kahlil Gibran said many years ago, "Our children come through us but not from us."
ReplyDeleteSorry, but I think I used that quote before in my comments. :) I just think of it so often when I think of what great sons I have.
ReplyDeleteHa, I don't remember seeing it. Maybe when people ask you where the math gene comes from you should say, "From me. I had it, and then they took it."
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