"Fermat's Enigma"

[fiefoe]

Things learned so far from Simon Singh:

• Pythagoras had one of his students drowned for discovering the existence of at least one irrational number: the beastly square root of 2.
• Caliph Omar's reasoning for laying the Library of Alexandria to waste: books that don't agree with the Koran are heresy, and ought to be destroyed; books that do are superfluous and ought to be destroyed too.
• The ratio between the actual lengths of rivers and their absolute distances is approximately pi.
• Perfect numbers such as 6 can be expressed as 2^n * (2^(n+1) - 1)
• (220, 284), the smallest pair of amicable numbers, used to symbolize friendship and love.
• The fewest weights to weigh things from 1 to 40 are: 1, 3, 9, 27, (because a scale has two sides).