Mathematicians still confused by Fermat's First Theorem

Pierre Fermat was an amateur French mathematician, who left us with many unsolved conjectures and theorems. The most famous was his "Fermat's Last Theorem", which was first formulated in 1637, and finally proven in 1999. But embarrassingly, mathematicians have still not been able to solve a riddle Fermat came up with in 1612, when he was 5 years old, dubbed as "Fermat's First Theorem".

Professor Andrew Wiles, who rose to fame proving the Last Theorem, is just as confused as everyone else. "The first theorem makes the last theorem look like a piece of cake.", Wiles said, adding, "It'll take a smarter mind than I to solve this one."

Part of the reason it has taken so long was due to the fact that Fermat wrote his first theorem with a crayon, and his handwriting was terrible. "I would be ashamed if I were little Pierre's mother.", said Miss Thomas, head mistress of St Joseph's School in Bengaluru, "I would have smacked him with a ruler until he wrote proper cursive".

Dramatic Reconstruction of Fermat formulating his First Theorem

Only surviving fragment of the First Theorem.

An additional hurdle was that five year old Fermat used non-standard mathematical notation in his statement of the First Theorem. Fields medalist Terry Tao said, "Some of the symbols are quite clear, like the ❤ symbol is clearly the Ergodic Hamiltonian operator, and the 💭 symbol is obviously the p-adic infinite dimensional Hausdorff manifold, but what is ↡? Who knows?"

Wiles has proposed to add the First Theorem to the Clay Institutes List of Millennium Problems. "Get rid of P ?= NP, and put this one in, it's far more interesting", Wiles said. Tao disagreed, "No one cares about the millennium prize anymore", he said, "I mean, the prize money is still $1 million - which was a large amount in 2000, but with all this inflation is chump change in 2023."

We asked Bard, Google's Generative AI Chat tool, to solve this problem, and this was the response. Good luck to you, Bard!