Fermat’s most notorious theorem, described in the section opener on page 782, baffled the greatest minds for more than three centuries. In 1994, after ten years of work, Princeton University’s Andrew Wiles proved Fermat’s Last Theorem. People magazine put him on its list of “the 25 most intriguing people of the year,” the Gap asked him to model jeans, and Barbara Walters chased him for an interview. “Who’s Barbara Walters?” asked the bookish Wiles, who had somehow gone through life without a television. Using the 1993 PBS documentary “Solving Fermat:
Andrew Wiles” or information about Andrew Wiles on the Internet, research and present a group seminar on what Wiles did to prove Fermat’s Last Theorem, problems along the way, and the role of mathematical induction in the proof.