Fermat's Last Theorem; Unlocking the Secret of an Ancient Mathematical Problem

xi, [1], 147, [1] pages. Illustrations. Author's Note. Index. Ink underlings and other marks noted. Amir Dan Aczel (November 6, 1950 November 26, 2015) was an Israeli-born American lecturer in mathematics and the history of mathematics and science, and an author. When Aczel was 21, he studied at the University of California, Berkeley. He graduated with a BA in mathematics in 1975 and received a Master of Science in 1976. Several years later Aczel earned a Ph.D. in statistics from the University of Oregon. Aczel taught mathematics at universities in California, Alaska, Massachusetts, Italy and Greece. He accepted a professorship at Bentley College in Massachusetts, where he taught classes on statistics and the history of science and history of mathematics. He authored two textbooks on statistics. While teaching at Bentley, Aczel wrote several non-technical books on mathematics and science, as well as two textbooks. His book Fermat's Last Theorem was a United States bestseller and was nominated for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Aczel appeared on CNN, CNBC, The History Channel and Nightline. Aczel was a 2004 Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, a visiting scholar in the History of Science at Harvard University (2007), and was awarded a Sloan Foundation grant to research his book Finding Zero (2015). In 2003, he became a research fellow at the Boston University Center for Philosophy and History of Science. He was a speaker at La Ciudad de las Ideas in, Puebla, Mexico, in 2008 and 2011. He died in Nîmes, France in 2015 from cancer. Over three hundred years ago, a French scholar scribbled a simple theorem in the margin of a book. It would become the world's most baffling mathematical mystery. Simple, elegant, and utterly impossible to prove, Fermat's Last Theorem captured the imaginations of amateur and professional mathematicians for over three centuries. For some it became a wonderful passion. For others it was an obsession that led to deceit, intrigue, or insanity. In a volume filled with the clues, red herrings, and suspense of a mystery novel, Dr. Amir Aczel reveals the previously untold story of the people, the history, and the cultures that lie behind this scientific triumph. From formulas devised for the farmers of ancient Babylonia to the dramatic proof of Fermat's theorem in 1993, this extraordinary work takes us along on an exhilarating intellectual treasure hunt. Revealing the hidden mathematical order of the natural world in everything from stars to sunflowers, Fermat's Last Theorem brilliantly combines philosophy and hard science with investigative journalism. The result: a real-life detective story of the intellect, at once intriguing, thought-provoking, and impossible to put down. Derived from a Kirkus review: For more than three centuries, Fermat's Last Theorem was the most famous unsolved problem in mathematics; here's the story of how it was solved. To begin with, Aczel sketches the essential problem: to prove that the deceptively simple equation A x + B x = C x does not hold true except where x=2. Pierre de Fermat, one of the most prolific mathematicians of the 17th century, formulated the problem in a marginal note to a mathematics text, claiming to have proved it. But he never published a proof, and later mathematicians failed to find a comprehensive proof. After laying the groundwork for an understanding of the basic concept, Aczel jumps back in time to the Babylonian era, when the foundations of mathematics were just being discovered. We follow the history of mathematics through various steps, growing ever closer to the time of Fermat. Aczel makes a special point of showing how mathematics continually builds upon the discoveries of earlier scholars, and he gives a lively sense of the personalities of the great mathematicians of the past. He does not overload the reader with equations and other mathematical expressions but gives enough to indicate the complexity of the concepts at issue.…