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language and one or two apiece in French, German, and even Chinese (but he decided early on not to bother with anything he would need to get translated). And the books—so many books! And all now available to him through the interlibrary loan! Ones that looked interesting, though perhaps not directly relevant to his quest, were those such as Scharlau and Opolka’s From Fermat to Minkowski and Weil’s Basic Number Theory, which according to the reviews was not all that basic, indeed quite advanced even for Ranjit. Less promising, because apparently written for an audience not as informed as Ranjit himself, were Simon Singh’s Fermat’s Enigma and Yves Hellegouarch’s Invitation to the Mathematics of Fermat-Wiles and the book by Cornell, Silverman, and Stevens called Modular Forms and Fermat’s Last Theorem. Well, the list was long, and that was only the books! What about the papers, the hundreds, maybe even the thousands, of papers that had been written on this most famous of mathematical conundrums and published—well, everywhere: in England’s Nature and the American Science, in mathematical journals refereed and respected and circulated around the world, and in mathematical journals issued in obscure universities in places such as Nepal and Chile and the Duchy of Luxembourg, and perhaps hardly respected at all.

Somewhat saddeningly he kept finding little curiosities that he would have liked to share with his father. There was, it seemed, a strong tradition of elements of number theory in Hindu literature as far back as the seventh century A.D. and even earlier—Brahmagupta, Varahamihira, Pingala, and, in the Lilavati of all places, Bhaskara. As well as that seminal Arab figure abu-i-Fath Omar bin Ibrahim Khayyám, best known to those who had ever heard of him at all, a number which had not previously included Ranjit Subramanian, as Omar Khayyám, the author of the long collection of poetic quatrains called The Rubaiyat.

None of this was particularly helpful in Ranjit’s dogged pursuit of Fermat. Even Brahmagupta’s famous theorem meant nothing to him since he did not particularly care that in a certain kind of quadrilateral a certain kind of perpendicular would always bisect its opposite side. However, when Ranjit came across the fourth or fifth mention of Pascal’s triangle and the taking of roots in connection with Khayyám, he sat down and composed an e-mail to his father telling of his discoveries. And then he sat for some time with his finger poised over the send button before he sighed and pushed cancel instead. If Ganesh Subramanian wanted to have a social relation with his son, it was his duty, not his son’s, to make the first move.

Four weeks later Ranjit had read, or read part of, every one of the seventeen books and nearly one hundred and eighty papers in his bibliography. It hadn’t been rewarding. He had hoped for some stray insight that would clarify everything else. That didn’t come. He found himself led up a dozen different blind alleys—over and over, because many of the mathematician authors were following the same paper trails as himself. Five or six times each he was reexamining Wieferich’s relatively prime exponents and Sophie Germain’s work on certain odd primes and Kummer’s theory of ideals and, of course, Euler, and, of course, every other mathematician who had innocently ambled into Fermat’s lethally inviting tar pit and, bellowing in fear and pain like any other trapped dire wolf, mastodon, or saber-toothed cat, had never escaped.

The plan was not working. With less than a week before the new school year began, Ranjit faced the fact that he was trying to work too many angles at once. It was something like the very GSSM syndrome Gamini had warned him against.

So he determined to simplify his attack. Being Ranjit Subramanian, his idea of simplifying was to make a head-on attack on that hated and endlessly long Wiles proof, the one that only a handful of the world’s leading mathematicians dared claim they understood.

He gritted his teeth and began.

The first steps were easy. But then he worked further into