Fermat's Last Theorem--Extreme Sports for the Brain

I love exercising my brain. I don’t like health clubs or running, so the only

350 years ago, in the margin of this text, Fermat claimed he could prove this theorem

way I get exercise is by thinking. To me, this is one of life’s traits that separates human from non-. Have you ever seen a dog sit quietly and think. No. He falls asleep.  Most animals hunt, play or sleep. Their critical problems–those that might cause their extinction, those that might make their life easier–are solved by evolution. They are replaced by a different species that adapts better to the environment.

Not true with the human species, Homo. When we aren’t hunting or playing, we are as likely to be thinking through a problem as sleeping. We have adapted to our environment as much through our own big brain’s problem solving abilities as by evolution’s incremental process of replacing one species with another.

Extreme sports for a thinker is solving unsolvable mathematical problems. And one of the most extreme is Fermat’s Last Theorem. It took 350 years and over 150 pages to solve the first time, making it a worthy exercise for the brilliant human brain.

In the novel I am currently working on, my antagonist sponsors a competition between a brilliant mathematical scientist and a unique problem solving AI to see which can come up with the solution to Fermat’s Last Theorem. Even for an eidetic mind, memorizing 150 pages of obtuse equations would be close to impossible. But if you know the logic that provides a blueprint for the solution, you could reproduce it.

Here’s a video video on how Andrew Wiles solved this amazing mathematical puzzle: