Jose Sanchez

Math 308

Fermat's Last Theorem

History shows us that from the first moment that humans started thinking about the concept

of a number, they were fascinated. The oldest traditions of numerology and astrology date

to when our understanding of mathematics and science were very limited. Today we

understand our universe, but many people are still attracted to the abstractions of number

theory.

At the age of 10 a young boy reading a mathematics book in his local library in

England stumbled upon one of the great unsolved problems that had puzzled many of the

greatest mathematicians for over 300 years. The boy was shocked to discover a problem

so simple any of his classmates could have understood it, but sufficiently difficult that it

had gone unsolved for centuries. From that day on, he decided he would solve the

problem, and prove what was already known as Fermat’s Last Theorem, which states that,

the equation an+ bn = cn has no integer solutions with n greater than 2. This problem,

which was originally found in the margins of a copy of Diophantus’ Arithemtica, wasn’t

really a theorem until it was finally resolved in 1994, by that boy after working on it for 7

years(The Proof).

Pierre de Fermat lived in the 17th century as a lawyer and later a judge. Though he

had no formal mathematical training, he was by far one of the greatest mathematicians of

his time. Throughout his adult life, Fermat taught himself mathematics and made many

important discoveries in many different fields including probability, calculus, geometry,

and number theory (Singh, 37). Upon his death his son published Fermat’s copy of

Arithmetica along with all the marginal notes Fermat had left, which included many
conjectures but little proofs (Berlinghoff, 158). Among these notes was Fermat’s Last

Theorem, so called because it is his last conjecture to finally be settled, since so much of

his work had been worked on and either proven or disproven in the more than 300 years

between his own life and that of Andrew Wiles. In his marginal note, Fermat also said

that he had a proof of his claim but that it would not fit in the margins. Thus, when his

notes were published many of the greatest mathematicians began to work on trying to find

the proof of his claim.

The first steps towards a solution were quick Fermat proved a special case of the

theorem, namely that of n=4, and shortly after Fermat’s death, the great Swiss

mathematician Leohnard Euler proved it for the case where n=3. At this point however

Euler noticed that it would be impossible to find a general argument based on the two cases

that had been done, as they utilized entirely different methods (Berlinghoff, 159). And yet

mathematicians continued to work on the problem, and in the late 18th century, progress

was being made as the case of n = 7, was taken care of. Still, it was Sophie Germain who

would obtain the first truly general result when she proved that if n and 2n+1 are both

primes then Fermat’s Theorem is true for that n. Numbers for which this is true are now

known as Germain Primes in her honor. This was a great accomplishment as until this

point people had only managed to prove single cases of the claim, and yet in comparison

with the total task it was still far from what was needed. It had already been realized that

only prime exponents needed to be checked, for if a counterexample existed that had a

composite exponent this would imply there had to be a smaller prime exponent that could

also be used as a counterexample. Yet even though there are an infinite number of primes
and an infinite number of Germain primes, there were still many cases left to check and

much work to be done (Singh 105).

The next person to try to prove this result in general would be Gabriel Lame, a

French mathematician who worked in the middle of the 19th century. Lame observed that

one of the difficulties of the theorem is that one side contains a product while the other has

a sum. He had the great idea of trying to factor the sum and then use this to factorization to

show that the theorem was true. Unfortunately, factoring numbers isn’t an easy task, and

for Lame it was worse still as he had to use complex numbers in his factorization. While

this was a clever trick, Lame’s attempts were foiled by the fact that he assumed that all the

properties of factorization of integers were also present in his factorization with complex

numbers. It would be Ernst Kummer, who was trying a similar approach to prove Fermat’s

theorem and indeed established a whole area of mathematics in his attempt to prove it, who

would point out that the critical property that Lame needed, uniqueness of prime

factorization, was not present (Aczel, 63).

Over the next hundred years not much progress was made in finding a prove of

Fermat’s Last Theorem, despite many attempts from great mathematicians such as Cauchy,

who many times thought he had done it, only to be disappointed when he discovered flaws

in his attempts (Aczel, 65). It is perhaps surprising that many great mathematicians chose

to not work on the problem. For example Gauss, arguably the greatest mathematician ever,

never attempted to prove the theorem despite encouragement from his friends who thought

if anyone could do it, it was him. Gauss refused to work on it, perhaps because he realized

just how complicated a problem it was and knew that he would not be able to solve it
(Aczel, 53). By Gauss’ time there were already rewards being offered to the first correct

proof. The most notable of these is the Wolfshekl prize which was offered in the early 20th

century.

For many decades then, no one made any substantial progress in proving Fermat’s

theorem, even as all his other conjectures were disposed of. In the 1950’s, two Japanese

mathematicians working in a field with seemingly no relationship to Fermat’s theorem

published their conjecture, called the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture. By this time, Fermat’

s theorem was very far from the main stream of mathematics and it was mostly amateurs

who were trying to prove it and earn the prize.the discovery that the Taniyama-Shimura

conjecture implied Fermat's Last Theorem would bring it back into the spotlight. While the

Taniyama-Shimura was not a simpler problem to solve than Fermat's Theorem, it had many

more implications that made it an important problem to work on(The Proof). In the early

1980's Ken Ribet finally proved that if the Taniyama-Shimura cojecture was correct, then

so was Fermat's Last Theorem.

When Andrew Wiles heard of Ribet's proof, he decided to start working to prove

Taniyama-Shimura and in this way establishing Fermat's Last Theorem. He worked in

secrecy and solitude for 6 years before announcing a proof in 1993, which he delivered in a

series of lectures (Berlinghoff, 160). His proof was received by great excitement and

applause since everyone knew the history of this great challenge. As the proof was

reviewed however, errors began to emerge. Most of these errors were simple to fix but one

in particular gave Wiles sufficient trouble that he had to devote another year of his life, and

finally ask for help from Richard Taylor, one of his past graduate students, to find a way to
correct the proof. Finally, in September of 1994, Andrew Wiles found the way to mend his

proof, and establish the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture as a theorem, which implied the

puzzle he had first read all those years ago in the library, Fermat's Last Theorem (The €

Proof). His dream had come true.

Andrew Wiles' dream meant the end of a problem that was open for more than 300

years, and while he was the one to finally prove it, Fermat's Last Theorem had been tackled

by many other mathematicians over the centuries. Ernst Kummer, who lived a century and

a half earlier than Wiles reached some important results while working on Fermat's Last

Theorem and in fact created a whole area of mathematics as a result of his attempts to

prove it.

Ernst Eduard Kummer was born on January 29th 1810, in Sorau, Bradenburg to Carl

Kummer, a physician. Sadly, when Ernst Kummer was only 2, his father died leaving

Ernst and his brother in the care of their mother. His father’s death meant that Kummer

would have to work hard throughout his life to achieve his goals, as his family didn’t have

a lot of money. After private instruction, Ernst entered high school and then to the

University of Halle to study theology, following his mother’s wishes. While in university,

Kummer had classes with Heinrich Ferdinand Scherk, who was extremely passionate about

mathematics and would pass on this great passion to Kummer.

After a couple of years, Kummer changed his course of study to mathematics, and

soon, at the age of 23, earned his doctorate in mathematics. Here, Kummer studied the

work of Gauss and Dirichlet, coming to regard them as his mentors, despite not having met

them. Unfortunately, at the time there were no open positions for him at the University,
so he had to settle for teaching at his old high school for a few years. During this time,

Kummer and Carl Jacobi began to correspond about hypergeometric series. This

exchange convinced Jacobi of Kummer’s mathematical abilities and soon he and

Alexander von Humbodlt tried to arrange for Kummer to take a position at the University

of Berlin, however they could not help him at the time.

In 1840, Ernst married Ottilie Mendelssohn, cousin of Lejeune Dirichlet’s wife, and

soon thereafter took a position at the University of Breslau with the support of Jacobi and

Dirichlet, who was at the time working at the University of Berlin. While at Breslau,

Kummer awarded an honorary degree to Eiseinstein, despite controversy between

Eisenstein and Jacobi who also supported the award. Kummer’s wife died in 1848, and he

remarried a few years later. Then in 1855, the great Gauss died and left a position open in

Gottingen University, which Dirichlet would take, leaving Kummer as his successor at the

University of Berlin. Soon Jacobi and Weierstrass joined Kummer at Berlin.

It was during this time that Kummer did the work he is most famous for, restoring

uniqueness of prime factorization for certain fields of complex numbers. With this

result, Kummer proved Fermat’s Last Theorem for many primes, a feat which earned him a

prize from the French Academy of Sciences, as they believed, correctly, that a complete

proof would not be found soon. Kummer’s work on ideals would later be extended by

Richard Dedekind. While at Berlin, Kummer created a seminar for pure mathematics that

attracted many students, some of whom would later become great mathematicians in their

own right. During these lectures, Kummer would mostly try to encourage his students to

experiment with mathematics as a way of learning. By all accounts, Kummer was a gifted
teacher, from his days at the high school, to his lectures in University, where his students

included Leopold Kronecker, who would later also make a name for himself.

Kummer was politically conservative and did applied mathematics as well as pure.

While in Berlin, he was appointed professor at the Berlin War College, where he used

mathematics to trace the trajectories of cannonballs and taught the laws of ballistics.

While mathematicians such as Jacobi could be called progressive for advocating a republic

in Germany, Kummer favored a constitutional monarchy. Though the two disagreed on

politics, Kummer is known to have agreed with Jacobi’s statement that, “The glory of

science is it’s having no use.”

As Kummer aged, he decided to retire from his position at the University of Berlin,

something that wasn’t easy as his colleagues still saw him as a strong mathematician,

though he himself felt that his mathematical abilities were fading. Kummer retired and

lived the rest of his life quietly. Once, while reflecting on the amount of work Gauss had

left to be edited and sorted after his death, Kummer said that nothing would be found in his

posthumous papers. He was survived by his second wife and children.

Having been such a great mathematician, Ernst Kummer held many important

honors, including being Dean at the University of Berlin, and then rector for a few years.

He was elected into the German Royal Society while he was still a schoolteacher, and his

work earned him international recognition when he was awarded a prize for which he didn’

t apply by the French Academy of Sciences, of which he later became a corresponding

member. Kummer’s life and work were most closely influenced by the great

mathematicians, Gauss and Dirichlet, while his own work and teaching inspired Kronecker
to thank him for “…my mathematical, indeed altogether the most essential, portion of my

mathematical life.”

It is important that we remember the human factor of mathematics because when

teaching, it is easy to forget that these ideas weren't always known and that the difficulties

that students face challenged even the greatest of mathematicians at some point. Hearing

what famous people say about mathematics may grab student's attention and spark their

curiosity to make them want to find out what can be so great about a subject for so many

people to have devoted their lives to it.

"Mathematics is the queen of the Sciences; and Number Theory is the queen of

Mathematics," so said Carl Friedrich Gauss, arguably the greatest mathematician to have

ever lived. Number theory has a paradoxical position in mathematics of being an area in

which amateurs can experiment and find some of the important results, yet is notorious for

having many questions that are simple to phrase but difficult to solve. A prime example

of this is Fermat's Last Theorem, which went unsolved for over three hundred years,

despite being very simple to formulate. Thus it is a challenge to present such problems in a

high school setting, since the solutions are often far beyond the scope of most mathematics

teachers, let alone students.

Yet students are often surprised to know that not all of the questions in mathematics

have been answered, let alone that some of them can't be answered. The difference

between having a problem and trying several different solutions that turn out to be wrong

and proving that a problem has no correct solution is a difficult one for many to grasp.

One famous problem that shows this distinction involves a chess board. The problem asks

that we consider a chess board with two opposite corners removed, is it possible to cover
the altered board with domino pieces that each fit on two adjacent squares? The answer is

not immediately obvious, and through experimentation one might guess that the answer is

that it is impossible to cover the board. Yet it is not enough to test several configurations

of dominoes and see that they fail, what is required to show that it is impossible is a proof.

This is interesting in itself, since we are asking to prove that something is

impossible, and thus no number of counterexamples will do, just as when we are trying to

prove something like Fermat's Last Theorem, it's not enough to check a large number of

cases. Indeed, Fermat's Last Theorem was checked for many exponents and combinations

of integers and never was a counterexample found, yet this was never considered proof that

it is true. With the chess board problem, a proof would consist of reasoning in a way

similar to the following: every domino covers one black and one white square, opposite

corners are of the same color, thus the altered chess board has two more squares of one

color than of the other, and by the design of the board they are not adjacent, thus no

domino can cover both of them, therefore it is impossible to cover the board.

It is, therefore, possible in mathematics to prove that certain problems have no

solutions. Another example, and perhaps one that is more closely related to Fermat's Last

Theorem if only because it is also a problem about numbers would be the question of

finding five odd integers that add up to 64. Here again a student may try several different

combinations of numbers that add up and not come up with any that work. Eventually they

may wonder whether the problem is in fact impossible and start trying to figure out why it

should be impossible. The student may then reason in the following way: an odd number

plus an odd number is an even number, an even number plus an even number is even, and

an odd number plus an even number is odd. We are adding 5 odd numbers, which reduce
to 2 even numbers and an odd number, which become one odd and one even, thus the sum

must always be odd. As 64 is even, it can never be the sum of 5 odd numbers.

While number theory is not generally a part of the curriculum in most high schools,

there are many interesting that teachers can use to help motivate and interest students.

Apart from Fermat's Last Theorem, the Goldbach conjecture, which states that every even

number greater than two is the sum of two primes, and the twin prime conjecture, which

asks whether there are infinitely many primes p such that p+2 is also prime, are both at a

level that any high school student can understand, and can motivate students to experiment

with mathematics in a way that many routine problems cannot. Exposing students to such

problems has the benefit of helping to show them the necessity of proof in mathematics, as

when they claim that a solution does not exist.

Aczel, Amir. Fermat's Last Theorem. 1. New York/London: Four Walls Eight Windows,

1996.

Bell, E.T. Men of Mathematics. 1. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1965.

Berlinghoff, William, and Fernando Gouvea. Math Through The Ages. expanded. Oxton

House Publishers and MAA, 2004.

Biermann, Kurt-R. "Kummer." Dictionary of scientific biography. 1990.

The Proof. Dir. Simon Singh. Perf. Andrew Wiles, Ken Ribet,.... Videocassette. PBS,

1997.

Singh, Simon. Fermat’s Enigma. 1. New York: Walker, 1997.