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This British documentary about Fermat’s Last Theorem is one of my favorite documentaries. I remember back in high school, after hearing about the theorem, I had spent an entire night trying to solve it. Of course, with my grade 10 mathematical knowledge, I could not do it. If you have a spare hour, I’d recommend watching the documentary — the story behind the proof is almost as good as the proof itself!

The theorem is so simple and Fermat’s proof is (supposedly) ingenious but it took over 350 years for someone to come up with a proof. The final proof is 200 pages long and uses advanced mathematical techniques unavailable to Fermat so the mystery of a simple proof still remains…

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This entry was posted on Sunday, September 23rd, 2007 at 11:11 pm and is filed under Entertainment, Offtopic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.