Footnote:

See Dick Rogers, “Homer Math Catches Up with the News,” San Francisco Chronicle (Dec. 16, 2005): B-7. Also the popular series Star Trek included its share of FLT. As the series in set in the future, it turned out at some point that one of the chapters retrospectively contained an unintended mistake that was created by poetic license. Indeed, in an episode aired in 1989 Captain Picard stated that FLT had remained unsolved for 800 years. Wiles proof of 1994 posed problem in this sense. Therefore, in an episode of 1995, the statement released in the 1989 episode was subtly corrected when reference was made to “one the most original approaches to the proof [of FLT] since Wiles over 300 years ago.”  

 

Calculating the Limits of Poetic License:
Fictional Narrative and the History of Mathematics

Leo Corry - Tel Aviv University