The Last Theorem - Arthur Charles Clarke [28]
Ranjit gritted his teeth. It was a question that, on dark nights and disappointing days, he had asked himself often enough. Without ever finding a good answer, either. He gave Davoodbhoy the not wholly good answer he had usually tried to content himself with: “Who knows? How can someone like you or me try to guess why a mind like Fermat’s went in any direction it liked?”
The mathematician looked at him with an expression that somewhat resembled tolerance but also resembled, to some degree, respect. He sighed and spread his hands. “Let me offer you a different theory of what happened, Subramanian. Let’s suppose that in—what was it, 1637?—in 1637 Monsieur Fermat had just completed what he thought was a proof. Then later that night, while he was reading himself to sleep in his library, let’s suppose he just couldn’t help himself, and in a fit of exuberance he scribbled that note in his book.” He paused there for a moment, giving Ranjit what could only be described as a quizzical look. When he went on, however, his tone would have been appropriate for a respected colleague as much as for an undergraduate expecting to be disciplined. “Then let’s suppose that sometime later he went over his proof to double-check it, and found it possessed a fatal error. It wouldn’t have been the first time, would it? Because that had already happened with other ‘proofs’ of his that he later admitted were wrong, hadn’t it?” Mercifully he didn’t require an answer from Ranjit but kept right on going. “So he tried to repair his proof every way he could. Unfortunately, he failed. So, trying to salvage something from his mistake, he then tried the more limited task of proving the argument for an easier case like p equals three, and there he succeeded; and for p equals four, and succeeded again. He never did get a proof of the p equals five case, but he was still pretty sure that one existed. He was right, too, because somebody else proved it after Fermat died. And all that time his scribble in Diophantus was sitting on a shelf in his library. If he ever remembered he’d written it, he thought, well, he probably ought to go back and erase that bad guess. But, after all, what’s the chance that anyone would ever see it? And then he died, and somebody was riffling through his books and did see it…and didn’t know that the great man had changed his mind.”
Ranjit didn’t change expression. “That,” he said, “is a perfectly sensible theory. I just don’t happen to believe that it’s what happened.”
Davoodbhoy laughed. “All right, Subramanian. Let’s leave it at that. Just don’t do it again.” He thumbed through the papers before him, then nodded and closed the file. “Now you can go back to your classes.”
“All right, sir.” He tarried for a moment after picking up his backpack, then asked the question: “But am I going to be expelled?”
The mathematician looked surprised. “Expelled? Oh, no, nothing like that. It was only a first offense, you know. We don’t expel for that unless it’s something a lot worse than stealing a password, and anyway the dean received some extremely glowing letters of support for you.” He opened Ranjit’s folder again and thumbed through the papers. “Yes. Here we are. One is from your father. He is quite positive you are basically of good character. In itself, to be sure, a father’s opinion of his only son might not carry great weight, but then there is this other one. It is very nearly as commending as your father’s, but it comes from someone who is, I think, not very close to you but who is a person of considerable importance in the university. In fact, he’s the university’s attorney, Dhatusena Bandara.”
And now Ranjit had a new puzzle to mull over. Who would have suspected that Gamini’s father would have exerted himself