I AM pleased to see that public interest in mathematics seems to be on the increase, and that literature is playing its part.
Among recent bestselling books is Fermal's Last Theorem by Simon Singh (Fourth Estate, £12.99 in UK), reviewed very favourably in these pages on Saturday. This is the story of how the most famous riddle in mathematics was finally solved by the British mathematician Andrew Wiles in 1994.
Similarly, Dava Sobel's Longtitude, which tells of one man's lifelong efforts to calculate longitude at sea, has become a bestseller. Ms Sobel now plans a study of Galileo's life by means of his daughter's diary.
All this is good news. My esteemed colleague John Banville has been ploughing a lonely fur row over the years, trying to drum up interest in mathematics by means of his books on Copernicus, Kepler and Newton, and at last his efforts are paying off.
I myself can claim a modest contribution to the present happy state of affairs as a result of my novella based on the life and work of the Greek mathematician Pythagoras.
My book tells how Pythagoras and his wife Hyacinth Py and Hy as they were popularly known - lived in a small suburb of Rhodes, on a neat triangular development overlooking a communal garden. Despite the reputation of mathematicians as shy retiring types, Py was a real party animal, and when he put away his beloved calculations in the evening, there was nothing he liked better than to hit the local bars and clubs with the vivacious Hy (this was before the five kids arrived, I need hardly add).
But his neighbours were of a different mind. Talk about partypoopers! Most of them were total squares. That is a hard thing to say, but there is no other word for it (nor was there in ancient Greek).
The most tedious of these neighbours, Timmy O'Danaos, lived around the corner from Py and Hy on Hypotenuse Avenue with his wife, Dona Ferentes. One Friday, when out for an evening walk, Hy saw Timmy through his lounge window playing solitaire while Dona did the ironing, and observed to Py that Timmy was "as bad as all the other bores put together".
In the Colossus nightclub some five hours later, as the bouzouki music throbbed and the air hung heavy with smoke, it came in a flash of inspiration to Py that the square on the hypotenuse was equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides.
In a separate essay I allude to the apocryphal story regarding Archimedes' leap from the bath, and his supposed cry of Eureka! when it dawned on him that a solid denser than a fluid will, when immersed in that fluid, be lighter than the weight of the fluid it displaces.
In actual fact, my studies in sanitation archaeology have revealed that Archimedes was not having a bath but a shower, and his leap occurred when his teenage daughter Ruth inadvertently (and not for the first time) flushed the downstairs toilet, thus scalding her father by cutting off his cold water supply.
His actual cry was not Eureka! ("I have found it") but Oirfooka!, which translates to, well, something rather rude, but understand able in the circumstances.
Archimedes later formulated the principle that the chances of a toilet being flushed at any given time are in direct proportion to shower usage. His work gave great impetus to the subsequent development of the thermostatic shower control.
But getting back to Pierre de Fermat: in 1637, the mathematician wrote in his copy of Claude Gaspar Bachet's translation of Diophantus's Arithmetica: "I have discovered a truly remarkable proof but this margin is too small to contain it."
This was the famous entry that intrigued so many mathematicians and kept them working for years to figure out the proof. It would be a shame however if Fermat's Last Theorem were allowed to overshadow his earlier and more interesting theorems.
Fermat's little known First Theorem states that comments scribbled on book page margins, however inane, are inevitably perused by readers before the page itself. In developing the theory, Fermat himself scribbled on thousands of bookpage margins, to the outrage of city librarians.
I myself know the magnetic lure of mathematics, and have spent many weekends vainly trying to reconstruct the long lost Plane Loci of Apollonius. And when playing the Lottery, or attending our Thursday night poker school, I would not be without De Ratiociniis in Ludo Aleae, Fermat's exchange of observations on game chance probabilities with fellow mathematician Blaise Pascal, extended and published by Huygens.
And when walking down Grafton Street on summer mornings, I often wonder how many men among us are not simply staring at attractive girls in summer dresses, but dreaming of Fermat's theory of curves.
