Mathematics

brilliant mathematicians whose genius has profoundly affected us, but which tragically drove them insane and eventually led to them all committing suicide. Kurt Gödel, the introverted confidant of Einstein, proved that there would always be problems which were outside human logic. His life ended in a sanatorium where he starved himself to death. Finally, Alan Turing, the great Bletchley Park code breaker, father of computer science and homosexual, died trying to prove that some things are fundamentally unprovable.

The Pythagorean Theorem is simple: x2 + y2 = z2. In this form, the equation can be solved. But what if the 2 is replaced with any positive integer greater than 2? Would the equation still be solvable? More than 300 years ago, amateur mathematician Pierre de Fermat said no, and claimed he could prove it. Unfortunately, the book margin in which he left this prophecy was too small to contain his thinking. Fermat's Last Theorem has since baffled mathematicians armed with the most advanced calculators and computers. Andrew Wiles methodically worked in near isolation to determine the proof for this seemingly simple equation.