Fermat’s Enigma: The Epic Quest to Solve the World’s Greatest Mathematical Problem, Singh, Simon. Published by Viking/Penguin, Toronto, Boston, New York, 1997. First Edition. 315pp. with appendices, index, illustrated. Foreword by John Lynch. Black boards with copper titles, yellow endpapers. Volume is in fine, unread condition and housed in a fine clipped dustjacket.
xn + yn = zn, where n represents 3, 4, 5, …no solution
“I have discovered a truly marvelous demonstration of this proposition which this margin is too narrow to contain.”
With these words, the seventeenth-century French mathematician Pierre de Fermat threw down the gauntlet to future generations. What came to be known as Fermat’s Last Theorem looked simple; proving it, however, became the Holy Grail of mathematics, baffling its finest minds for more than 350 years.
