Google Doodle Commemorates Fermat’s Last Theorem on His 410th Birthday

                                                                                                                                                                          Today is the birthday of Pierre de Fermat, and there’s a Google Doodle to celebrate! Today’s Doodle is a chalkboard showing Fermat’s Last Theorem, famously scribbled in the margins of Arithmetica, with a note that the proof of the theorem didn’t fit there — see the mouseover on the actual Doodle for a reference to this. The theorem stated that there are no three positive, different integers a, b, and c such that an + bn = cn is true for any integer n greater than 2.Fermat’s claim left mathematicians puzzled for over 350 years — as mathematicians proved it true for many sets of possible values of n — until the general case was finally proved by Andrew Wiles in 1995. The story about the proof is told in Simon Singh’s book Fermat’s Enigma: The Epic Quest to Solve the World’s Greatest Mathematical Problem.
Did Fermat really have a proof? Most likely not, since the techniques Wiles used to prove it weren’t developed until several centuries after Fermat’s death — and since, in the 30 years he lived after writing the note, he never wrote about the general case of the proof again — but nobody will ever know for sure. I’ll leave that, as they say, as an exercise for the reader.
“I have discovered a truly remarkable proof but this margin is too small to contain it,” Pierre de Fermat famously wrote on margin of his copy of the Arithmetica by Diophantus of Alexandria back in 1637. The proof the French mathematician and lawyer was referring to was for his theorem in which he states that no three positive integers x, y, and z can satisfy the equation xn + yn = zn where n is an integer greater than two.Fermat’s Last Theorem, also called Fermat’s great theorem, was his best known work and to commemorate the 410th birth anniversary of the founder of the modern theory of numbers Google has put up a doodle inspired by the theorem. Instead of a copy of the Arithmetica, the Google doodle uses a blackboard with a faintly erased Google logo and the theorem written in chalk.Google also does a little spin-off on Fermat’s famous words and notes in the alt text of the doodle (that is readable when a user hovers the cursor over the image) “I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this theorem, which this doodle is too small to contain.”