The Math Genius Who Proved Star Trek Wrong

“The Royale” is one of the more forgettable Star Trek episodes, but it did provide some wild character moments, including the strange revelation that Picard likes to do complex math equations for fun. He really does bring it up out of nowhere, suddenly asking Riker if he’s familiar with Fermat’s Last Theorem.

Riker admits that he doesn’t know much about it because he “spent too many math classes daydreaming about being on a starship (relatable, honestly).” This gave the captain the excuse to explain to his first officer (and most people watching at home) what the big deal with this old theorem really is.

As Picard helpfully explains, “When Pierre de Fermat died they found this equation scrawled in the margin of his notes. X to the nth plus Y to the nth equals Z to the nth, where n is greater than 2, which he said had no solution in whole numbers.” 

The mathematician claimed that he had found a proof (a “remarkable proof,” as Picard notes), but nobody ever found it. Our intrepid Star Trek captain admits that he likes to solve this math riddle because he thinks it’s “stimulating,” but he also likes how “it puts things in perspective.” 

That’s when Picard practically beats us over the head with the theme of the episode: “In our arrogance, we feel we are so advanced, and yet we cannot unravel a simple knot tied by a part-time French mathematician working alone, without a computer.” Sure enough, that observation pops up at the end of the episode, too, when the captain ponders how an ancient Earth vessel would have gotten so far out in the galaxy. “Like Fermat’s theorem, it’s a puzzle we may never solve.”

So far, this sounds like par for the Star Trek course…it’s perfectly believable that Picard does math for fun, a character moment no less nerdy than Tilly blurting out, “That’s the power of math, people!” decades later on Discovery. However, the big problem with Picard’s assertion that the theorem hasn’t been solved in 800 years is that Andrew Wiles successfully provided a proof back in 1995.

The franchise couldn’t ignore how a sole math genius proved the writers wrong, so Picard’s statement about Fermat’s Last Theorem was later retconned in DS9. 

In the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode “Facets,” Jadzia Dax mentions that her previous host Tobin was also a math nerd who had “the most original approach to the proof since Wiles over 300 years ago.” This seems to imply that even though Wiles untangled this particular riddle back in the ‘90s, people continued to try to develop additional proofs and otherwise build on the legacy of the earlier research. Therefore, it would make sense for someone like Picard to continue taking a crack at the theorem centuries after someone else already made history by creating the first workable proof.

While the Star Trek writers had egg on their faces for the TNG episode asserting nobody had managed to untangle this math riddle, the writers deserve full credit for name-checking Wiles in the subsequent DS9 episode. After all, he had only published his proof about a month before “Facets” aired, so the writers and producers had to move fast to include this factoid. Now, maybe Wiles can devote his mathematical acumen to an even bigger task: calculating, down to the decimal point, just how annoying Wesley Crusher was in Season 1.