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+----- Thread: Fermat's Last Theorem [BBC Horizon] (/showthread.php?tid=1604)
Fermat's Last Theorem [BBC Horizon] - mklabgr - 08-16-2026
Fermat's Last Theorem
BY [BBC Horizon]
Summary
The 1996 BBC Horizon documentary Fermat’s Last Theorem, made by Simon Singh and John Lynch, tells the remarkable story of Andrew Wiles and his decades-long fascination with one of mathematics’ most famous problems. The theorem states that for integers $n>2$, the equation $x^n+y^n=z^n$ has no solutions in positive integers, a claim Pierre de Fermat famously said he had a proof for but never recorded.
After more than 350 years of failed attempts, Wiles realized that a connection between Fermat’s problem, elliptic curves, and the Taniyama–Shimura conjecture offered a route to a proof. He then worked largely in secrecy for seven years before dramatically announcing his result in a series of Cambridge lectures in 1993. But mathematicians subsequently discovered a serious gap in the proof, leaving Wiles devastated. After months of unsuccessful attempts to repair it, he experienced a crucial insight in 1994 that allowed him, working with Richard Taylor, to overcome the problem and complete the proof.
More than a documentary about a theorem, the film presents mathematics as an intensely human activity, emphasizing obsession, creativity, disappointment, perseverance, and the extraordinary emotional satisfaction of solving a problem that had resisted some of the world's greatest mathematicians for centuries. Wiles’s emotional recollection of the breakthrough became one of the documentary's defining moments.
LECTURE