On June 23, 1993, Dr. Andrew Wiles walked to the front of a lecture hall in Cambridge, England. He was there to give the last in a series of talks that he titled, “Modular Forms, Elliptic Curves, and Galois Representations.” This was not at all out of the norm, as Wiles was a professor of mathematics at Princeton University who studied number theory. That’s why nobody really expected much to happen that day other than to have Wiles walk through his recent research on elliptical shapes.
But about 20-minutes into the talk, everything changed. After presenting a seemingly routine set of mathematical conclusions, Wiles looked up and said, “Implies Fermat’s Last Theorem.” This may not sound like much to us, but it was a really big deal. Fermat’s Last Theorem was the world’s most famous mathematical hypothesis that had been unsolved for over 350 years. It was the white whale of mathematics that had tempted many before Wiles to squander their prime years in pursuit of the proof.
That was the day that modern mathematics changed.
Fermat’s Last Theorem was first stated by the French mathematician Pierre de Fermat in 1637. He originally wrote it in the margins of his copy of an old Greek text called Arithmetica. In its most basic form, the theorem states that no equation of the form xn + yn = zn has a whole-number solution when n is greater than two. But rather than show a proof for the theorem, Fermat simply wrote that, “I have discovered a truly marvelous demonstration of this proposition that this margin is too narrow to contain.” That is, I know the answer, but I don’t have enough space to write it. So began modern math’s hardest problem.
Andrew Wiles first encountered the theorem when he was 10 years old in a math book that he found at the library, and he had long fantasized about solving it. Wiles was even going to attempt the proof for his PhD thesis at Cambridge University, but his advisor convinced him to avoid the tempting dead-end path. Instead, Wiles chose to study elliptic curves, got his PhD, and eventually joined the faculty at Princeton in 1981.
But some dreams just won’t die.
Life at Princeton treated Wiles well. He got married, published meaningful papers, and enjoyed teaching classes. But in 1986, Wiles was sipping ice tea when his friend casually mentioned that a number theorist from the University of California in Berkeley named Ken Ribet laid out a new path for proving Fermat’s Last Theorem. Specifically, Ribet discovered that in order to prove Fermat’s theorem, one need only prove a new conjecture from two young researchers in Tokyo called the Taniyama-Shimura Conjecture.
And while the Taniyama-Shimura Conjecture wasn’t necessarily any easier to prove, Wiles was electrified. He later told NOVA, “I knew that moment the course of my life was changing.” Wiles abandoned all of his other research, cut himself off from the rest of the world, and spent the next seven years working alone in his attic. He was going to prove Fermat’s Last Theorem, and this time he wasn’t going to let anyone talk him out of it.
From that day on, the only person that Wiles told about his work was his wife. For the first two years, he did nothing but immerse himself in the problem, trying to find a strategy that might work. Then he worked in fits and starts, slowly chipping away at what would become his proof. Wiles later explained the journey as follows:
“Perhaps I could best describe my experience of doing mathematics in terms of entering a dark mansion. One goes into the first room, and it's dark, completely dark. One stumbles around bumping into the furniture, and gradually, you learn where each piece of furniture is, and finally, after six months or so, you find the light switch. You turn it on, and suddenly, it's all illuminated. You can see exactly where you were. At the beginning of September, I was sitting here at this desk, when suddenly, totally unexpectedly, I had this incredible revelation.”
And that was it. When the lights came on, Wiles had solved Fermat’s theorem. So, he took the stage at that conference in Cambridge in June 1993 to tell the world. And despite the understated reveal, the news spread fast. The New York Times put the story on the front page, People Magazine named him one of “The 25 Most Intriguing People of the Year,” and Gap asked him to model a new line of jeans (he declined). It was validation for taking the leap that most wouldn’t. A leap that could have landed him in obscurity with his best years behind him.
We love stories like this.
A human being encounters an impossible dream that they just cannot shake. And when everything and everyone tells them to move on to a more sensible path, they persist against all odds. They put their heads down and struggle (sometimes for years) to eventually reach their goal. It’s Amelia Earhart across the Atlantic, Edmund Hillary atop Everest, or Roger Bannister breaking the four-minute mile. These stories give us hope. They help us believe that our own unshakeable dreams might someday come true.
And that’s why I'm writing you today.
Exactly one year ago, I told you that I was in the process of writing a book called Work Songs. The idea was that for as long as we've had language, we've had music for the work we do. Sea shanties, field songs, and industrial hymns that helped our ancestors fight boredom, find meaning, build connections, and survive.
But modern work has no song. For the first time in our history, there is no music for the work we do. There are no hymns to sing in the offices, factories, fields, shops, or restaurants where we work today. We let the music die, and we did it when we needed it the most. Which is why this book is just a collection stories about work.
Stories that could be our songs.
Whether it’s the courage of Nellie Bly to go undercover in a deplorable insane asylum to invent investigative journalism, the emptiness of success that led to an early death for the boxer Sonny Liston, or the fight that inspired Bruce Springsteen to write the biggest hit of his life, it is my hope that the stories in this book will do what the work songs of yore did before: help us fight boredom, find meaning, build connections, and survive.
And now it's done.
Yesterday I wrote the last sentence of this book. It's been a long year and a half with many nights and weekends alone in the trailer. As I reflect back on this journey, I realize that like Andrew Wiles, I have been in that dark mansion since I started this project. Just feeling my way around, unable to see how it would all turn out.
But unlike Wiles, I wasn't really alone. Because in writing each of these stories, I connected with these people in such a way that I didn't just learn about them, I learned about myself. And I guess that's really what the creative process is all about.
I'll be writing soon to let you know what happens from here. Until then, I'm hopeful that you all are safe and well.
To our time in the dark mansions before the lights come on,
Matt