Andrew Wiles broke my heart. From the time I was a little girl, I had always meant to prove Fermat’s last theorem, just as soon as I got a spare minute. But first I had a lot of French homework to get through, and then there was my cousin’s wedding, and I had to stay in the office late writing memos, and August is so enervating, and then Wiles went and proved the thing.
Of course, there are still a few great unsolved problems left: a Hilbert problem or two, the Goldbach conjecture, and just how many light- years-per-second is warp 9, anyway? I figured I’d better get moving before someone beat me to the punch again. But when I cleared some space on my desk and sat down with a pair of number two pencils, a legal pad, a protractor, and a Cray supercomputer, nothing happened. I sharpened the pencils. Nothing happened. I exchanged the legal pad for graph paper. I sharpened the pencils again. Nothing happened.
I was experiencing a creative block.
I called my old friend Michael Larsen, a number theorist at the University of Pennsylvania, for advice. I’m trying to prove the Goldbach conjecture, but I’m getting nowhere, I said. What should I do?
Have you tried studying math? he suggested.
