The Last Problem

Eric Temple Bell

• Publisher: Barakaldo Books
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781839744525
• Topic: Sciences biologiques
• Subtopic: Science générale

What Eric Temple Bell calls "The Last Problem" is the problem of proving 'Fermat's Last Theorem', which Fermat wrote in the margin of a book almost 350 years ago. The original text of The Last Problem traced the problem from 2000 BC to 17th century France. Along the way we learn quite a bit about history, and just as much about mathematics. This book fits no categories. It is not a book of mathematics: it is a biography of a famous problem. Pages go by without an equation appearing. It is both a history of number theory and its place in our civilization, and a history of our civilization's relationship with mathematics. This rich and varied, wide-ranging book, written with force and vigor by someone with a distinctive style and point of view will provide hours of enjoyable reading for anyone interested in mathematics.—Print ed.

1 — Prospectus: Unfinished Business

This is a double biography. It has two heroes: a problem, of which hints can be traced back to the Babylonia of about 2000 B.C., and a man, Pierre Fermat, 1601-1665, who in 1637 set the problem in its present form. The idea of such a biography was inspired—if that is the right word—by the atomic bomb and its successors: the hydrogen bomb, the U-bomb, and from there on out as far as nuclear physics can go before the end, if there is to be an end.

Suppose that our atomic age is to end in total disaster. Civilization will be wiped out, and with it all but a scattered handful of human beings too deeply diseased to start the long climb up from primitivism. What problems that our race has struggled for centuries to solve will still be open when the darkness comes down? A philosopher might suggest several, such as the nature of “reality”; a moralist could propose the problem of good and evil; a sociologist might ask how to abolish poverty and war; and so on. But problems such as these have not yet been stated sharply enough for a moderately critical onlooker to understand precisely what they are about. When the proposers disagree among themselves on the meanings of their problems, realists may be pardoned for suspecting that some are pseudo-problems incapable of solution. So we shall leave them aside and look for others on an understandable level, in the hope of finding one or two that make simple sense and conceivably admit definite answers, although we have not found them after hundreds of years.

Where shall we look for such problems? Current science seems to offer many—the nature of life, for instance, or the ultimate constitution of matter and radiation. But most of these again are either ambiguous or too broad for exact statement. The first may not even make sense. So we shall have to be content with something that anyone with an elementary-school education can understand, no matter how trivial it may seem at a first glance. Here a promising lead is the recorded history of the most elementary mathematics, particularly arithmetic.

The broad outlines of the relevant history, from ancient Sumeria, Babylonia, and the Egypt of about 2000 B.C., to A.D. 1958, are reasonably clear. We may profitably explore these. Our candidates for outlasting humanity should not only be easily understandable by any person of normal intelligence with an ordinary education; for at least a century they should also have withstood the strongest attacks of some of the greatest mathematicians in history. The time limit is set to ensure that the problems are really hard, however easy or trivial they may seem to those who have not seriously tried to settle them, or who may be unacquainted with the part these simple arithmetical problems have played, and continue to play, in the long development of mathematics, both pure and applied.

Two problems present themselves immediately. The older one dates from the fourth century B.C., and is Greek. Of all the mathematical questions left by the Greeks, this is the only one that is still unanswered. Though the Greeks did not state it explicitly, it is at once suggested by some of their earliest discoveries. It seems approachable and may be solved before the end. Although it is not the main problem to be discussed, I include it because it was the source of much ingenious but inconclusive work from the seventeenth century to the 1950s, and also because it has a curious connection, discovered only in 1938, with the second and possibly harder question. It concerns a peculiar property of certain common whole numbers, which I shall describe here ahead of its history. Those who wish to get on at once to the history may pass to the next chapter.

The sequence of natural numbers, or the positive integers, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6,...is the basis of arithmetic, both elementary and higher. Each of these numbers after 1 is exactly divisible without remainder by at least two numbers in the sequence; thus 2 is divisible by 1 and 2, or 2=1·2 (the dot is read “times,” thus 1 times 2); 3 is divisible by 1 and 3, 3=1·3; 4 is divisible by 1, 2, and 4, 4=1·4=2·2; 5 is divisible by 1 and 5, 5=1·5; 6 is divisible by 1, 2, 3, and 6, and so on. The numbers that divide a given number exactly (without remainder) are called the divisors of the number. If 2 is a divisor of a number, the number is called even, otherwise odd. The even numbers are 2, 4, 6, 8 ···, the odd are 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, ···. Those divisors of a given number that are less than the number itself are called the aliquot parts of the number. For example, the aliquot parts of 6 are 1, 2, 3. Following the Pythagoreans in the sixth century B.C., and Euclid in the third or fourth century B.C., we note that the sum, 1+2+3, of the aliquot parts of 6 is equal to 6. A number which is equal to the sum of its aliquot parts is called perfect. By trial, we find that the next perfect number after 6 is 28; all the aliquot parts of 28 are 1, 2, 4, 7, 14, and their sum is 28. With sufficient persistence the reader may verify that the next perfect number after 28 is 496, the next 8128, the next 130816, the next 2096128, the next 33550336, the next 8589869056, ···. Notice that these first seven perfect numbers end in 6 or 8, so all are even. All the perfect numbers so far discovered are even and all end in 6 or 8. The first part of the problem of perfect numbers is to prove or disprove that an odd perfect number exists. This is included in the second and probably much harder part: find all perfect numbers by means other than trial.

About 300 B.C., Euclid stated and proved the sufficient form of an even perfect number (see Chapter 6), and Euler in the eighteenth century proved that Euclid’s form is also necessary, but neither of these first-rank mathematicians gave any method much better than trial for finding the successive even perfect numbers. The problem is deep. We shall have to know much more than we do about prime numbers before a decisive attack is feasible. A prime number, or briefly a prime, is a number greater than 1 having only 1 and itself as divisors; for example, 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29 are the first ten primes. Note that 1 is not counted as a prime; the only even prime is 2. As will appear when we come to Euclid, the problem of finding even perfect numbers is equivalent to that of discovering primes of a certain kind. One of the modern calculating machines invented for use in the Second World War was released when not engaged in military work for a few hours now and then to explore the sequence 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, ···for perfect numbers. The calculations this machine did in a matter of hours or a few days were far beyond the capacity of the entire human race toiling twenty-four hours a day continuously for months or years. But the machine did not solve the ancient Greek problem of perfect numbers. Machines cannot think. I shall have considerably more to say about these numbers in later chapters.

The second candidate for the possible distinction of outlasting the human race is a French problem dating from 1637. Fermat is responsible for this:

Prove or disprove that if n is a number greater than 2, there are no numbers a, b, с such that

(F) an+bn=cn.

“Number” here means positive integer as already defined—common (natural) whole number. For those who have forgotten how to read algebraic symbolism,{1} an means a·a ··· a, where there are n a’s; an is called the nth power of a; for example, a3=a·a·a, the third power of a, 54=5·5·5·5=625 and so on. Similarly, for bn, cn; so the problem may be restated thus: to prove or disprove that if n is greater than 2, the sum of the nth powers of two positive integers is never equal to the nth power of a positive integer.

The exception n=2 is necessary since, for example, 32+42=52, that is, 9+16=25, and, as the Babylonians and Plato knew, there are actually an infinity of positiveinteger solutions of a2+b2=c2. Fermat asserted that his equation (F) is impossible in numbers a, b, c, n if n exceeds 2. This assertion is known as “Fermat’s Last Theorem,” or “The Great Fermat Theorem.” He said that he had a proof.

Why have mathematicians bothered with Fermat’s unsubstantiated claim? Possibly because it is a challenge to the powerful methods of the mathematics developed since Fermat’s seventeenth century, and pride in craftsmanship obligates the mathematicians of one generation to dispose of the unfinished business of their predecessors. More objectively, numerous unsuccessful attempts to dispose of Fermat have resulted in deep theories with many applications to both pure and applied mathematics, and from there to science in general. Without the initial stimulus of Fermat’s baffling assertion, none of these useful things might have been invented. But possible utility has played only a very minor part compared to sheer curiosity.

It may be of interest to say how I came to write this account of what led up to Fermat, and the conditions under which he and his predecessors made their simple but profound discoveries. Having been long acquainted with the mathematics concerned, I became interested in its creators as human beings and men of their times; and when the opportunity came I tried to find out something about them. Sometimes there was nothing or but very little. The lives of many are almost unknown, or compressed to a dry sentence or two in the standard histories of mathematics. The Babylonian mathematicians have left not even their names; a few of the astronomers have. But much is known about the civilizations in which all these mathematicians did their enduring work. Some of this may suggest what the lives of the men concerned may have been like. The truism that a man is a product of his times suggests that we look at the man’s times when he himself is not in plain view. If most of his contemporaries were brutal and callous according to the morals we profess, it is unlikely that he invariably was considerate to his fellow men. The most to be expected of him is a protective shell of indifference without which he could hardly have got on with his work. We shall see instances of this, especially in Euclid’s Alexandria of the third and fourth centuries B.C., and Fermat’s seventeenth-century France. Funeral orations, obituaries and official biographies of scientific men either take the shell for granted and say nothing about it, or give it a thick coat of whitewash. So it comes as a shock to find that a great man who seemed to be above the barbarism of his times was after all in some respects no higher than the degradation, the corruption, the slavery, and the cruelty that made it possible for him to live and work in ease and security. But the shock is unreasonable. We need only to look about us. The pattern persists.

Until we scan the record we might imagine that peace is a necessary condition for the creation of lasting mathematics. It was not so in Euclid’s and Fermat’s times. Much of Fermat’s best work was done while one of the most savage wars in history raged all about him. Yet he never alludes to it in his correspondence. Even the Alexandria that fostered the golden age of Greek mathematics owed its foundation to the wars of Alexander the Great; and while Euclid and his colleagues were serenely mathematicizing, recurrent wars increased the wealth and prestige of that great city, Alexandria, and the oppressed peasantry fled to the swamps of the Nile because they could “stand no more.” Again the pattern persists into our own times. The warp is squalor, grinding labor, poverty to starvation, crude bestiality, inhuman (or human?) brutality, and the woof, polite refinement, ease, luxury, knowledge, learning, and science. Of course there are gray threads between the black and white, but they are rather rare.

One of the following chapters gives an account of the life and times of Fermat, founder of the theory of numbers and one of the great mathematicians of history. Not a mathematician by profession, Fermat never held any academic position. He approached mathematics as an amateur and attained the first rank. He is the only mathematical amateur in history of whom the last is true.

Whatever of a man’s “life” is worth remembering may extend from thousands of years before he was born to centuries after he is dead. It is so with Fermat. To understand his work we shall have to go far back to its beginnings in Babylonia, and from there follow down the tenuous thread to the seventeenth century in France. Only those items out of all the incredibly rich mathematical history of about 3700 years having a direct bearing on Fermat’s discoveries in the theory of numbers will be noted in more than brief and passing detail. We shall observe what kinds of societies and individuals contributed to this amateur mathematician’s decisive achievements in one of the most difficult—though apparently the simplest—departments of mathematics.

If some of what I have included may seem remote from mathematics, my reason is that even mathematicians have been interested in the more human side of their fellows. The geometer Guillaume Lhopital, for example, asked about Newton, “Does he eat, drink and sleep like other men? I represent him to myself as a celestial genius, entirely disengaged from matter.” Many of the people we shall meet ate and drank well, and some were up to their chins in the muck of material things. Perhaps that is why they and their civilizations produced lasting mathematics. The only man we shall encounter in a cloister is Father Marin Mersenne, and he was no insipid saint. To make his otherwise rather drab existence interesting he tempered austerity with good fare and scholarly politics—stirring up bitter disputes between his intellectual friends. Mersenne, incidentally, is one of several mathematicians mentioned only in passing, if at all, in the shorter histories of mathematics. In connection with Fermat, however, he is important. That shifty but on the whole not unlikable scoundrel, Sir Kenelm Digby, is another of these lesser figures who counted in Fermat’s life. Of quite a different stature was that celebrated prodigy, John Wallis, a pygmy next to Fermat, who had the effrontery to condescend to the great Frenchman. Wallis never understood what Fermat was talking about, but as an irritant he had an important part in Fermat’s mathematical development. Others, now all but forgotten, survive as far as they do chiefly because they irritated Fermat to the point of taking up their challenges. I have given short sketches of the lives of such minor characters where they are of some independent interest.

Fermat’s greatest work was in the theory of numbers, of which, as noted, he was the founder as it is developed today. The theory is not c...

Table of contents

• Title page
• 1 - Prospectus: Unfinished Business
• 2 - The Far Beginnings: Babylon and Egypt
• 3 - Philosophical Interlude
• 4 - Alexander’s Contribution
• 5 - Cleopatra’s Gift
• 6 - From Euclid to Hypatia
• 7 - Dating-Collapse-Recovery
• 8 - The Last Euclidean: Bachet (1581-1638)
• 9 - Mathematician and Jurist-Fermat
• 10 - The Catalyst: Mersenne (1588-1648)
• 11 - Friends and Others
• 12 - From the Correspondence of Fermat
• 13 - An Age to Remember
• 14 - The Jurist
• 15 - Aftermath (A final note by D. H. Lehmer)
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR