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It was a nightmare writing this post, because annoyingly, I can’t understand a word of it. I’m not a mathematician, but Pierre de Fermat was (in a part-time sense), and he was a lawyer in his day job. That makes the whole thing even more annoying. You can imagine, being both a mathematician and a lawyer, he would be in two minds working out any equation. Question: What is 5+3? The mathematician – ‘eight’. The lawyer – ‘What would you like it to be?’

Anyway, take a deep breath – here we go: Fermat’s (last) theorem states that no three positive integers a, b, and c satisfy the equation an + bn = cn for any integer value of n greater than 2. The cases n = 1 and n = 2 have been known since antiquity to have an infinite number of solutions.

Blimey, if you can understand that, you have a better brain than I have. I mean, what the…? I think Fermat was having a giraffe.

And also, what the hell is a theorem? I looked it up and apparently it’s ‘a general proposition not self-evident but proved by a chain of reasoning; a truth established by means of accepted truths.’ Well that’s crystal clear then. Again, I’m none the wiser, so don’t ask me to give you an example. It’s absolute gobbledygook. There’s even a pretentious semi-colon in there, which leads me to conclude that the writer was right up his own… (enough of that, calm down – Editor). Anyway, a theorem in understandable terms is a formal statement that can be shown to be true through logic.

Fermat had probably had a belly-full after a lifetime of chalkboards and courtrooms, but he reckoned he had one more theorem to write and then he was done. So he deliberately devised a theorem that was so complex and diabolical that no-one could prove it, not even himself (this is all a bit far fetched – Editor). Then all the mathy types scratched their heads and frowned, and then scratched their heads some more. They all tried hard to work it out.

Down the years hundreds of mathematicians submitted ‘proofs’, but each and every one was wrong. Or incomplete. Or in one case, a blueprint for a multi-storey carpark by mistake (surely not? – Editor). And then, after more unsuccessful attempts than you could shake a slide-rule at, they gave up. It drove others mad. No wonder it was called his last theorem. I can hear them telling him – Oi Fermat, that’s your last one. You’re banned, mate. Don’t ever darken our door again. At his funeral you could hear Fermat sniggering from inside his coffin. That’s foxed ’em all, he was saying, sort that one out if you can…

Well, someone did. Eventually. It took more than 350 years mind, before another mathematician (who wasn’t also a lawyer) took it upon himself to put Fermat in his place. In 1995, a British mathematician called Andrew Wiles published the final proof for Fermat’s last theorem, and it was correct! This only goes to show. You should never give up. Even the most difficult problem can be solved if enough thought and effort goes into it. Resilience is important, and so is determination. If you believe in yourself, you can achieve absolutely anything. Even proving Fermat’s last theorem. And that about sums it up.

Next time: 17. Moore’s obsolete law

Previous posts in the #TwistedTropes series
1. Pavlov’s drooling dog
2. Chekhov’s smoking gun
3. Occam’s bloody razor
4. Schrödinger’s undead cat
5. Pandora’s closed box
6. Frankenstein’s well-meaning monster
7. Thor’s lost hammer
8. Noah’s character ark
9. Hobson’s multiple choice
10. Fibonacci’s annoying sequence
11. Sod’s unlucky law
12. Dante’s lukewarm inferno
13. Plato’s empty cave
14. Aladdin’s miserly lamp
15. Batman’s tangled cape
16. Cupid’s bent arrow

Fermat’s dodgy theorem by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.