Gerhard Frey had come to the dramatic conclusion that the truth of Fermat’s Last Theorem would be an immediate consequence of the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture being proved. Frey claimed that if mathematicians could prove the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture then they would automatically prove Fermat’s Last Theorem. For the first time in a hundred years the world’s hardest mathematical problem looked vulnerable. According to Frey, proving the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture was the only hurdle to proving Fermat’s Last Theorem.
