Get Cynical

No, this is not an article about cooling. This is something little that you can do to make your mouse’s life a bit better. Everybody wants to look good, your mouse too.

In 1963 a ten-year-old boy borrowed a book from his local library in Cambridge, England. The boy was Andrew Wiles, a schoolchild with a passion for mathematics, and the book that had caught his eye was The Last Problem by the American mathematician Eric Temple Bell. The book recounted the history of Fermat’s Last Theorem, the most famous problem in mathematics, one which had baffled the greatest minds on the planet for over three centuries.

There can be no problem in the field of physics, chemistry or biology that has so vehemently resisted attack for so many years. Indeed E.T. Bell predicted that civilisation would come to an end as a result of nuclear war before Fermat’s Last Theorem would ever be resolved. Nonetheless young Wiles was undaunted. He promised himself that he would devote the rest of his life to addressing the ancient challenge.

The mathematical short-hand for this family of insoluble equations is:

xⁿ + yⁿ = zⁿ , where n is any number greater than 2.

According to Fermat, none of these equations could be solved, and he noted this in the margin of his Arithmetica. To back up his theorem he had developed an argument or mathematical proof, and following the first marginal note he scribbled the most tantalising comment in the history of science:

Cuius rei demonstrationem mirabilem sane detexi hanc marginis exiguitas non caperet.

I have a truly marvellous demonstration of this proposition which this margin is too narrow to contain.

Thomas. It’s a story for you, I swear.’

Every writer hears that sentence. People without an idea of how long a book takes to write pass on the tale of an amusing uncle or aunt, along with the strange addendum: I could write it if I had nothing else to do. The suggestion is sometimes passed on tentatively, sometimes with the sincere expectation that the writer will answer, Wow! That he will drop to his knees and embrace this jewel of a story. That it will take him a few weeks’ leisure to produce the finished manuscript.

But I had never heard the words pass the lips of a soul so vivid, so picaresque, so full of life, as Poldek.

I said, ‘What is it?’

He said, ‘I was saved, and my wife was saved by a Nazi. I was a Jew imprisoned with Jews. So a Nazi saves me, and more important saves Mischa. So although he’s a Nazi, to me he’s Jesus Christ. Not that he was a saint. He was all-drinking, all-black marketeering, all-screwing. Okay? But he got Mischa out of Auschwitz, so to me he is God.’