BOOKS
507
Apparently, as the authors brilliantly document, there seems to be no
limit to new insights into the horrors of that fascist state, with which
Germans and Austrians in particular still are trying to come to terms.
EDITH KURZWEIL
T he Las
t
Theorem
FERMAT'S ENIGMA:T HE EPIC QUEST TO SOLVE THE WORLD'S GREATEST
MATHEMATICAL PROBLEM.
By
Sinton Singh. Walker
&
Co. $23.00
There was an electricity of anticipation among the two hundred mathe–
maticians who had come to hear a lecture at the Isaac Newton Institute at
Cambridge University on the afternoon of June 23, 1993. A visiting local
boy who made good in New Jersey, the forty-year-old Princeton profes–
sor, Andrew Wiles, had given two earlier lectures that had not been
super-exciting. But the audience suspected that Wiles's third and finallec–
ture might be a great moment in the history of mathematics. Although he
had not announced it, there was a rumor that Wiles might present a proof
of the most famous unproved conjecture in the theory of numbers, known
as "Fermat's Last Theorem." Its proof had eluded the world's greatest
mathematicians ever since Pierre Fermat had made his conjecture in the
seventeenth century.
And indeed, Wiles did present a tightly reasoned, brilliantly convincing
proof of Fermat's Last Theorem. When he was done, the audience cheered,
and by the next morning, the story ran on the front page of
The New York
Times,
headlined "At Last, Shout of 'Eureka!' In Age-Old Math Mystery."
Six months later,
People Magazine
included Wiles in its year-end roster of
the twenty-five most intriguing people of 1993, along with Oprah Winfrey
and the Princess of Wales. Alas-known neither to
People Magazine
nor to
most people, even mathematicians-by that time a small team of number
theorists whom Wiles had asked to make a confidential, line-by-line check
of his very lengthy and complicated proof before he released it for publi–
cation had found that it was flawed. Undaunted and self-confident, Wiles
was convinced that the flaw was not lethal and set about trying to
fix
it,
while public attention had turned to other momentous developments, such
as the
o.
J.
Simpson murder trial.
Fixing the flaw turned out to be harder than Wiles had thought. But
after many months of excruciating cerebration he had managed to do it by
replacing a complex procedure that had introduced a logical gap into one
