“I have discovered a truly remarkable proof but this margin is too small to contain it,” Pierre de Fermat famously wrote on margin of his copy of the Arithmetica by Diophantus of Alexandria back in 1637. The proof the French mathematician and lawyer was referring to was for his theorem in which he states that no three positive integers x, y, and z can satisfy the equation xn + yn = zn where n is an integer greater than two.
Fermat’s Last Theorem, also called Fermat’s great theorem, was his best known work and to commemorate the 410th birth anniversary of the founder of the modern theory of numbers Google has put up a doodle inspired by the theorem. Instead of a copy of the Arithmetica, the Google doodle uses a blackboard with a faintly erased Google logo and the theorem written in chalk.
Google also does a little spin-off on Fermat’s famous words and notes in the alt text of the doodle (that is readable when a user hovers the cursor over the image) “I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this theorem, which this doodle is too small to contain.”
