Riemann's riddle

WHEN Andrew Wiles, a British mathematician working at Princeton University, announced a decade ago that he had solved Fermat's last theorem, his discovery was reported on front pages around the world. The Frenchman's mathematical conundrum, which had taken more than 350 years to unravel, went on to inspire a television documentary, a bestselling book, and even “Fermat's Last Tango”—a musical that boasts such lines as: “Elliptical curves, modular forms, Shimura-Taniyama. It's all made up, it doesn't exist, algebraic melodrama.”