Simon Singh and John Lynch’s film tells the story gripping and emotional Andrew Wiles. A quiet English mathematician, was attracted to mathematics in Fermat’s puzzle, but in the 70 Cambridge, FLT was considered a joke, so aside. Then in 1986, an extraordinary idea linked this irritating problem with one of the deepest insights of modern mathematics: the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture, the name of a young Japanese mathematician who tragically committed suicide.
The link means that if Taniyama was true then it must be FLT. When she heard, Wiles went after his childhood dream again. “I knew the course of my life was changing.” For seven years he worked in his attic study at Princeton, says that anyone but your family. “My wife has only known me while I was working on Fermat,” says Andrew.
In June 1993, reached its goal. In a three-day conference in Cambridge, described Taniyama proof – and with it the last theorem. Wiles lifestyle retreat was shattered. Math the first pages of the world press. Then disaster struck. His colleague, Dr. Nick Katz, presented a small request for clarification. It became a huge hole in the test. As Andrew struggled to repair the damage, increased pressure to release the manuscript – to give up his dream. So Andrew Wiles retired back to his attic. Closed all but Fermat.
A year later, at the time of the defeat, had a revelation. “It was the most important time in my working life. Nothing will ever be the same.” The failure was the very key to a strategy it had abandoned years before. In a moment of Fermat was shown, a lifetime ambition achieved, the greatest enigma of mathematics no longer existed.
