Simon Singh – Fermat's Enigma: The Epic Quest to Solve the World's Greatest Mathematical Problem – Easton Press – 2000 - Collector's Edition Simon Singh (born 1964) is a British physicist, science writer, and broadcaster who took his doctorate in particle physics at Cambridge and Geneva before turning to journalism with the BBC. Fermat's Enigma, his first book, grew out of the BBC Horizon documentary he co-produced with John Lynch in 1996 on the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem by the British mathematician Andrew Wiles. Singh has since written widely on cryptography, cosmology, and the public understanding of science, but Fermat's Enigma remains the book on which his reputation chiefly rests and is widely regarded as one of the finest works of popular mathematics ever written. This volume tells the story of a single equation, x to the n plus y to the n equals z to the n, and of the three and a half centuries of mathematics that flowed from a marginal note left in a copy of Diophantus by the seventeenth-century French magistrate Pierre de Fermat. Fermat claimed to have a proof that no whole-number solutions exist when n is greater than two, but never wrote it down; the resulting puzzle, Fermat's Last Theorem, became the most famous unsolved problem in mathematics and resisted every attempt at proof until 1995, when Andrew Wiles, working largely in secret in Princeton, produced a proof that drew on the modular forms and elliptic curves of late twentieth-century number theory. The book traces this history from Pythagoras and the early Greeks through Euler, Sophie Germain, Kummer, and Hilbert to the Taniyama–Shimura conjecture and Wiles's announcement at Cambridge, and reads as both a history of an idea and a portrait of a peculiar intellectual life. The foreword is by John Lynch. The text is the first edition of 1997 (Walker Publishing Company), reproduced in full with the original diagrams, photographs, and appendixes. The Easton Press has issued the book in its standard Collector's Edition format. Full genuine leather binding in tan brown Front and back covers with gilt rule borders framing an all-over diaper pattern of small gilt mathematical motifs Spine with raised bands, gilt panels containing a stylised summation symbol motif, and gilt title and author lettering Easton Press monogram stamped in gilt on the lower spine panel All edges gilt Tan silk ribbon marker Photographs and mathematical diagrams integrated with the text throughout Printed on archival-quality acid-neutral paper Printed and bound in the United States of America Condition is As New. A pristine collector's copy. Ships from Germany. Carefully packed in cardboard book mailer with protective wrapping.