I live in Australia. One day I received a very excited phonecall at a ludicrously early time from a Canadian Mathematician I knew (John McKay, Concordia. He's dead now but had been a figure in my childhood from his time in Edinburgh in the 60s. he had worked with John Conway early in both their careers) telling me this was rumoured to be coming, and asking me to get the word out and find out what I could. I pointed out I wasn't a mathematician or very well connected, he said "doesn't matter: Get to your national broadcaster and ask them to verify the story"

So I rang the ABC and asked to speak to the Science Desk. This was at around 7am by this time. I was connected immediately to Robyn Williams, the premier science communicator at the ABC, despite having no name, no evident back story or trust. He was absolutely delightful to talk to, agreed with a laugh that he often got excited calls about people squaring the circle or finding repeat patterns in PI digits and was used to crank callers, listened to me, probably did some checks and then said he'd contact somebody at Cambridge and see what the gen was. My memory is he called me back a little while later saying they'd confirmed a room was booked for a significant public announcement seminar, and thanked me for the tip. This was a long time ago, it's equally likely I misremembered and he gave me a name to check with in the UK and I did the leg work. The point is, I wasn't just told to bugger off.

Nowadays it would be all over twitter. John was a bit old school and liked phone calls. They had internet emails in 92 of course I think he just liked the physicality of a call.

Unfortunately this clip cuts just before the most emotional part. At 01:29 as he's about to break down, he says – this is my memory, sorry, paraphrasing:

"Nothing I ever do again…" – and then, having barely held it together for the last 30 seconds, he has to stop. It brings me to tears every time I watch it.

A man realising the sheer magnitude of the thing he did. It's the most relevant part for humanity today.

Ah! Found it. This is a better clip. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaKyvr4ar1Q

(disclaimer: I haven't watched this yet)

Mathematicians / folks knowledgeable on the subject - do you think Fermat had an error in his (lost) proof? Or that there exists a solution that perhaps is more straightforward than Wiles's?

My understanding is that Wiles had to use a ton of math (and invent some new math?) that had not yet been invented in Fermat's time.

Andrew Wiley gently smiles, does his thing an voila!

Q.E.D. we agree and we all shout hurra

as he confirms what Fermat

jotted down on that margin

which could have used some enlarging

Aside: the AI summary of this attributes the wrong person. This is Andrew Wiles.

I've only skimmed it but Simon Singh's book on it seems reasonably accessible to non-experts

One interesting thing of FLT is Wiles is on record as saying it opened the door (I think. This is from memory) to Langlands Program, a series of mathematical connections

Harder problems of course exist, Riemann Hypothesis et al but FLT still took hundreds of years to solve

Just to check, this video isn't NSFW is it?

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