The recap
In 1637 the French lawyer and amateur mathematician Pierre de Fermat jotted a note in the margin of his copy of the Arithmetica, an ancient Greek work by Diophantus: he had found a marvellous proof of a simple-looking claim about whole numbers, but the margin was too narrow to hold it. For more than three centuries the finest minds in mathematics tried to supply that missing proof, and failed. Simon Singh tells the story of the puzzle and the people it consumed, from the number games of ancient Greece through a gallery of brilliant, eccentric and sometimes tragic figures, before arriving at Andrew Wiles, the English mathematician who had dreamed about the problem since he was a boy and then worked on it in secret for years. Singh makes genuinely hard ideas feel within reach, using clear analogies and leaving the heavier details to short appendices for the curious. It reads like a detective story in which the clues are equations and the suspense is entirely real.
Why read it
For anyone who loved puzzles at school but lost touch with maths, and for readers who enjoy true stories of obsession and perseverance.
Fun facts
- 01
Singh wrote the book after making a 1996 BBC Horizon documentary on the theorem with John Lynch; the film won a BAFTA and aired in the US on NOVA as The Proof.
- 02
It was published in Britain as Fermat's Last Theorem and in the United States as Fermat's Enigma.
- 03
It reached number one on the British bestseller list and has been translated into more than twenty languages.
- 04
Before moving into television and writing, Singh earned a PhD in particle physics at the University of Cambridge while working at CERN in Geneva.
