Google paid tribute on Wednesday to 17th century French mathematician Pierre de Fermat, transforming its celebrated homepage logo into a blackboard featuring “Fermat’s Last Theorem”. Google marked what would have been Fermat’s 410th birthday by replacing its logo, known as the Google “doodle”, with the problem that vexed mathematicians for centuries. In the margin of a book, Fermat wrote that he had found a “truly marvellous proof” to the math puzzle but the margin was too narrow for him to write it out. When scrolled over with a mouse, the Google doodle echoes Fermat’s famous words saying: “I have discovered a truly marvellous proof of this theorem, which this doodle is too small to contain.” Fermat’s Last Theorem was finally solved by a British mathematician in the 1990s.
