Fermat's Enigma

By Simon Singh,

Book cover of Fermat's Enigma: The Epic Quest to Solve the World's Greatest Mathematical Problem

Book description

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…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Fermat's Enigma as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

I’ve read a whole bunch of books on the history of mathematics, but this is by far my favorite.

Singh uses the most famous problem in mathematics, called “Fermat’s Last Theorem” to give us a kaleidoscopic account of the subject, starting with the Greek greats like Pythagoras and Plato, and taking us all the way to Andrew Wiles, the contemporary mathematician who finally solved Fermat’s theorem after a few centuries’ worth of attempts.

The book truly gets to the heart of what drives mathematicians. It also is so full of delicious anecdotes and thoroughly engaging math puzzles that I simply…

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