(Roughly) Daily

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On the heels of yesterday’s film recommendation, another… albeit somewhat different:  Stanford physics professor, Leonard Susskind, one of the fathers of string theory, articulator of the Holographic Principle,  and explainer of the Megaverse, has a gift for making science accessible… a gift that is on display in this lecture, “Demystifying the Higgs Boson“:

(email readers, click here)

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As we say “ahh,” we might spare a thought for Pierre de Fermat; he died on this date in 1665.  With Descartes, one of the two great mathematicians of the first half of the Seventeenth Century, Fermat made a wide range of contributions (that advanced, among other fronts, the development of Calculus) and is regarded as the Father of Number Theory.  But he is best remembered as the author of Fermat’s Last Theorem.* Fermat had written the theorem, in 1637, in the margin of a copy of Diophantus’ Arithmetica– but went on to say that, while he had a proof, it was too large to fit in the margin.  He never got around to committing his proof to writing; so mathematicians started, from the time of his death, to try to derive one.  While the the theorem was demonstrated for a small number of cases early on, a complete proof became the “white whale” of math, eluding its pursuers until 1995, when Andrew Wiles finally published a proof.

* the assertion that no three positive integers a, b, and c can satisfy the equation aⁿ + bⁿ = cⁿ for any integer value of n greater than two

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