@import url(/styles/data/datastyle.css); Search The Site More options Back issues Home News ... Advertise with us From the issue dated April 23, 2004 Mathematics With a Moral Printer friendly E-mail article ... reprints By ROBERT OSSERMAN The past decade has been an exciting one in the world of mathematics and a fabulous one (in the literal sense) for mathematicians, who saw themselves transformed from the frogs of fairy tales regarded with a who-would-want-to-kiss-that aversion, when they were noticed at all into fascinating royalty, portrayed on stage and screen by such glamorous stars as Mary-Louise Parker, Matt Damon, and Russell Crowe. True, the dramatized mathematicians were generally troubled, but they were geniuses and ultimately sympathetic. Who bestowed the magic kiss on the mathematical frog? There may have been two kisses, one from inside and the other from outside the world of mathematics. The external kiss came first, in the spring of 1993, with the debut of Tom Stoppard's play Arcadia, which depicted mathematical genius in the guise of an appealing 13-year-old girl full of adolescent exuberance, saucy humor, and high spirits. The opening scene of the play refers to Fermat's Last Theorem, already a famous problem in 1809, when the scene takes place, and by 1993 considered the most famous unsolved problem in all of mathematics. Just two months after the play opened came the kiss from within, as Andrew Wiles announced that he had finally proved Fermat's Last Theorem. The formerly obscure realm of mathematical research made the front pages of newspapers around the world, and the real-life fairy tale of Wiles's seven-year struggle with the proof was portrayed on television and in books, reaching what may have been the height of unreality as he and his wife watched themselves depicted as the lead characters in a New York musical | |
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