In the third century B.C., a Greek mathematician named Archimedes jumped from his bath, rushed home naked and dripping, shouting "Eureka, eureka!" He had just discovered an important physical principle. In 1937 A.D., a German-Jewish mathematician named Samuel Isaac Krieger, who was taking a mineral bath near Buffalo, N. Y., suddenly leaped out, rushed naked into the adjoining room, began to scribble figures. He thought he had discovered something too: a solution to the equation given in Fermat's last theorem.
The last theorem of French Mathematician Pierre Fermat, laid down in the 17th...