The French jurist and mathematician Pierre de Fermat claimed the answer was “no”, and in 1637 scribbled in the margins of a book he was reading (by Diophantus) that he had “a truly marvellous demonstration of this proposition which the margin is too narrow to contain” and the story went on without a winner but with meaning. Many cases were established, such as for specific powers, families of powers, super natural gratifications and then lust. Then came ‘that’ Taniyama–Shimura-Weil conjecture in 1955 which some Mathematicians thought could change the way Mathematics could be imagined. It did. It was proved wrong yet again, and Fermat’s last Theorem stood right where it began. Unsurprisingly, a Princeton dropout ‘Andrew Wiles’ took away the Abel Prize this week, for what they think “for his stunning proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem by way of the modularity conjecture for semistable elliptic curves, opening a new era in number theory”.

95% of the job had already been done by 1986 and then this guy stands up and makes this work his own, and by the year 1993, he is done with his proof. What about when Sophie Germain innovated and proved the approach of the entire class of prime numbers. What when Ernst Kummer extended this and proved the theorem for all regular primes. What about Gerhand Frey who finally noticed the apparent link between the modularity theorem and Fermat’s Last Theorem. It’s not difficult if you choose an easy option like an overdose, but many a people have already committed suicide over the past two decades who had been trying to prove this dammed theorem. Having already secured the status of “the most difficult proof of all time”, this theorem is still a nightmare for a lot of mathematicians even two decades after Wiles made his proof public.

I knew a person personally who was about to publish his 17-page thesis last year, compared to the 309-page theory that Wiles had written, but then his demise just made things worse. ISI & CMI literally went mad at his demise, but then for some people life is too cruel. Too harsh for most of us, while too easy for a few. Even to this date, people are trying to get a better version of this theorem and loosing the real world. People won’t care about you, until you do something really big. People can forget you while you foresee a brighter dawn, those dumboholics only getting into your way, when the sun rises. Some of us do seek sympathy rather than solutions. But at the end, it’s vengeance that makes you what you have been afterall. That rage that drives them, that anger that gives you immense power, but yet again, it can banish you, as it has taken away thousands of genius minded brains whose yield was nothing more than a piece of paper filled with formulaes. We already know that we fear the most that we cannot see, but then they have never seen things that they think will make them legends, or can they? Who knows. They start with a belief, but end abruptly with guilt, abhorrence and finally hating themselves, and when they realise what they had messed up, it was too long to actually get back their past.

Life is not something we should risk.