Word: fermat
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...last theorem of French Mathematician Pierre Fermat, laid down in the 17th Century states that there are no solutions to the equation: x n +y n = z n , n being a power greater than the square and x, y and z being whole numbers which are not zero.* Fermat wrote on the margin of a book that he had hit upon a proof of the theorem, but that there was not room enough on the margin to write it out. He died before he wrote it anywhere else that anyone knew of. The theorem became celebrated in the history...
...principle. In 1937 A.D., a German-Jewish mathematician named Samuel Isaac Krieger, who was taking a mineral bath near Buffalo, N. Y., suddenly leaped out, rushed naked into the adjoining room, began to scribble figures. He thought he had discovered something too: a solution to the equation given in Fermat's last theorem...
When he hit on his bathroom solution of Fermat's equation, Krieger at once cabled to Göttingen asking whether the 100,000-mark prize was still there. Back came the answer: "Preis besteht noch" (Prize still stands). Krieger doubted, however, that Adolf Hitler would allow the money to leave Germany, especially since the claimant was conspicuously non-Aryan. A matter which he apparently overlooked was that the prize is offered for proof of the theorem, whereas his solution, if valid, would constitute disproof...
Last week Herr Krieger made headlines once more by announcing that he would reveal the values for x, y and z which would solve the Fermat equation. They turned out to be 1,324; 731; and 1,961. He would not reveal n-the power-but said it was less than 20. An astute reporter from the New York Times, no baby in mathematics himself, pored over this equation: 1,324 n +731 n =1,961 n . The reporter saw that the first number raised to any power at all would end in either 6 or 4, the second raised...