Times: 2026 Mar 28 from 10:40AM to 10:55AM (Central Time (US & Canada))
Abstract:
The humanistic approach to any aspect of mathematics adds a refreshing dimension. It is especially pertinent from the pedagogical angle. The session on the Unspoken History of Mathematics is a perfect platform to raise such questions and generate new lines of thinking. For the sake of simplicity, I have defined bricks and blocks of mathematics as a set in the complement of a set of hard core theorems, propositions, lemmas, corollaries, definitions, problems etc. In this paper, I explain bricks and blocks by taking the example of the most celebrated theorem, Fermat’s Last Theorem (FLT). After more than 350 years, its proof was ultimately put to rest in 1994 by Andrew Wiles (b.1953 - ). The nuts and bolts or bricks and blocks of FLT, with a focus on Wiles, are his wife and children, schools and colleges he attended, institutions he worked, his students, classmates, neighbors, friends, colleagues, supervisors, and any tangible factors. They are generally invisible, unheard, and unspoken!