In the end, Wiles was forced to work in secrecy and isolation for seven years, harnessing all the power of modern maths to achieve his childhood dream. Wiles’s lifelong obsession with a seemingly simple challenge set by a long-dead Frenchman is an emotional tale of sacrifice and extraordinary determination. Aged just ten, Andrew Wiles dreamed that he would crack it. The solution of Fermat’s Last Theorem is the most important mathematical development of the 20th century.In 1963 a schoolboy browsing in his local library stumbled across the world’s greatest mathematical problem: Fermat’s Last Theorem, a puzzle that every child can understand but which has baffled mathematicians for over 300 years. The extraordinary story of the solving of a puzzle that has confounded mathematicians since the 17th century.
