I wonder sometimes whether Google Doodles are the modern-day cave paintings, destined to be discovered thousands of years from now by future generations of humans or extraterrestrials baited foolishly by Katy Perry or lizard people from the center of the Earth. I think the best Google Doodles reflect human society pretty accurately. Here's one I'd be proud of: Today's Doodle celebrates the life of memorable mathematician Pierre de Fermat. Today's his 410th birthday! Did you get him anything? I sent the guy a gift copy of Minecraft; should keep him busy for a while.
Fermat is perhaps best known for Fermat's Last Theorem, which essentially states the following:
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.
Pretty easy to understand, as obscure math theorems go, but as always, the proof's the thing. Here's the story: Fermat's initial record of the so-called "Last Theorem" was scribbled in the margins of Arithmetica. An accompanying note famously indicated that Fermat had a proof for the theorem, but that he didn't have sufficient room to spell it out. For the 30 years that followed the theorem's initial publication, Fermat remained silent about this mythical proof. Over the years, many mathematicians proved the theorem for various sets of variables, but nobody proved the general case until 1995, when British mathematician Andrew Wiles pulled it off more than three centuries after the theorem's first appearance.
So was Fermat sitting on a general proof way back when? Probably not. The techniques Wiles used to prove the theorem weren't available until centuries after Fermat's death, and Fermat never wrote about the proof again. That makes the legendary proof either the best-kept secret in mathematics or the most epic troll in all of academia. Both of those are deserving of a doodle. Here's to you, Fermat, old buddy--we miss you, but we're glad you weren't here to see the lizard people take over Earth.
Want to connect with other math Ologists? Join the discussion over on My.Ology!
Follow Josh Harrison on Twitter: @geekologized.
[TDW Geek]
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