## Extended Essay : Almost completely done !

Yeah … finally, I’ve been working on this damn paper for about a year now. The final product is almost here, it just needs some proofreading and making sure all the correct citations are in place. Then I get to hand it in and make rude hand gestures. As it is, I feel absolutely great about the product I have, but it needs a little bit of polish still. I’ll give it a few days to rest before I attack it with my pen, especially to get away from having any sort of close attachment to the words as they are now. Serious, odd, wacky details after the jump, ’cause it’s some pretty hefty mathematics.

So, I wrote the paper about Andrew Wiles’ proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem. For those who do not know what FLT is, here it is:

There do not exist integral (whole number terms) $x, y,$ or $z$ such that $x^n + y^n = z^n$, for some $n>2$.

Yeah, it looks like the Pythagorean Theorem $a^2 + b^2 = c^2$. But it’s a little more twisted than that. The idea is simple, but the implementation is tricky, because it involves four possible infinities, which makes proving the statement nigh impossible.

In short (given that the paper is 15 pages, I can go on for a while … ) Wiles caused a general revolution in how proofs are created, and paved the way for later work which relied on highly unorthodox methods of writing proofs in order to generate new knowledge.

Yeah … it’s a paper. A now-written paper. Which feels really good right about now.