Fermat’s Theorem: The Texas Oil Heir Who Took on Math’s Impossible Dare

In September 1981, Mr. Vaughn funded the world’s first massive convention on the Fermat riddle. It befell at Endicott Home, an M.I.T. assembly heart close to Boston set in a French manor-style mansion on leafy grounds. The organizers have been Dr. Goldfeld of Columbia, Dr. Edwards of N.Y.U., Dr. Koblitz of the College of Washington, Nicholas Katz of Princeton College and two Harvard mathematicians: Barry Mazur and Dr. Wiles.

The convention drew 76 members, 16 from overseas, and the mathematicians offered 25 analysis papers. It was a dramatic shift from the early lack of curiosity. The attendees included Dr. Coates, the doctoral adviser to Dr. Wiles; Dr. Iwasawa, the Princeton professor; and Atle Selberg, a large of arithmetic who later received the Abel Prize.

In 1982, the proceedings have been revealed as “Quantity Idea Associated to Fermat’s Final Theorem.” It was a part of a sequence, “Progress in Arithmetic,” for which Dr. Coates was a co-editor.

Within the e book’s preface, Dr. Goldfeld credited Mr. Vaughn with the concept for the convention and thanked him for supporting it and “pure arithmetic normally.” A half dozen of the e book’s chapters, together with one Dr. Wiles co-wrote, addressed Iwasawa principle and elliptic curves.

Some attendees complained to Mr. Vaughn that direct assaults on the Fermat query had been sidelined by the elliptic-curve focus, Dr. Goldfeld recalled Mr. Vaughn as saying. However Mr. Vaughn, he added, “was proper in the long run” to have embraced the esoteric subspecialty.

Shortly after the Boston convention, Mr. Vaughn aimed greater. As a “grand benefactor,” he helped fund a gathering in 1986 of the Worldwide Congress of Mathematicians, the world’s largest math physique. The weeklong math fest was held in Berkeley, Calif.

On its sidelines, a discovery hinted at potential Fermat progress. It occurred over cappuccino as Dr. Mazur of Harvard met with Ken Ribet, a Berkeley math professor. As Dr. Ribet described his most up-to-date work on the Fermat query, Dr. Mazur, contemporary from the Boston convention, gaped at him in marvel. “However don’t you see?” he requested, in keeping with “Fermat’s Enigma,” the writer Simon Singh’s account of its fixing. “You’ve already accomplished it!”