Fermat's Enigma

by Simon Singh

G. H. Hardy tried to explain and justify his own career in a book entitled A Mathematician’s Apology: I will only say that if a chess problem is, in the crude sense, “useless,” then that is equally true of most of the best mathematics…I have never done anything “useful.” No discovery of mine has made, or is likely to make, directly or indirectly, for good or ill, the least difference to the amenity of the world. Judged by all practical standards, the value of my mathematical life is nil; and outside mathematics it is trivial anyhow. I have just one chance of escaping a verdict of complete triviality, that I may be judged to have created something worth creating. And that I have created something is undeniable: the question is about its value. The desire for a solution to any mathematical problem is largely fired by curiosity, and the reward is the simple but enormous satisfaction derived from solving any riddle. The mathematician E. G. Titchmarsh once said: “It can be of no practical use to know that π is irrational, but if we can know, it surely would be intolerable not to know.”