The Secret Story of the Texas Philanthropist Who Helped Solve Math's Toughest Riddle
WHO: James M. Vaughn Jr., heir to a fortune generated by the oil gushers of East Texas; English mathematician Sir Andrew Wiles; and seventeenth-century French amateur mathematician Pierre de Fermat.
WHAT: The untold story of the philanthropic endeavor that led to the solution to math’s hardest puzzle.
WHY IT’S SO GREAT: Back in 1637, or thereabouts, a lawyer and hobbyist mathematician named Pierre de Fermat wrote a few tricky math problems. Known as Fermat’s theorems, these puzzles became famous, helping to define the world’s understanding of mathematics. The process of solving them took a long time, however. Fermat’s “little theorem,” regarding prime numbers, did not see its first published proof for nearly a hundred years. His polygonal number theorem went unproven in full for another eight decades beyond that, with its final full proof published in 1813. And his most famous puzzle, Fermat’s last theorem, was a mathematical mystery that stretched across centuries.
The theorem is relatively simple: It states that no three nonzero integers can satisfy the equation a^n + b^n = c^n, where n is any integer greater than 2. The proof for it, however, bedeviled mathematicians. Fermat’s final theorem wasn’t just unsolved; it was considered unsolvable. In 1961, mathematician Eric Temple Bell published a book, The Last Problem, that declared the theorem would remain unsolved until the end of civilization. A 1989 episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation set in the year 2364 references the theorem as still unsolved—a reference that became outdated just five years later, when English mathematician Andrew Wiles solved it, crafting the proof he would publish the following year.
All of that is history, and not particularly Texan. But this week, the New York Times revealed another piece of the puzzle: The paper published an interview with James M. Vaughn Jr., the 82-year-old East Texas philanthropist and oil heir whose foundation, the Vaughn Foundation Fund, spent decades financing research into Fermat’s final theorem.
Read more:
https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/secret-story-texas-philanthropist-who-helped-solve-math-toughest-riddle/