Fermat’s Last Theorem: The compelling biography and history of mathematical intellectual endeavour

by Simon Singh

would underestimate the number of primes. In 1955 S. Skewes showed that the underestimate would occur sometime before reaching the number This is a number beyond the imagination, and beyond any practical application. Hardy called Skewes’s number ‘the largest number which has ever served any definite purpose in mathematics’. He calculated that if one played chess with all the particles in the universe (1087), where a move meant simply interchanging any two particles, then the number of possible games was roughly Skewes’s number. There was no reason why Fermat’s Last Theorem should not turn out to be as cruel and deceptive as Euler’s conjecture or the overestimated prime conjecture.