Fermat's Last Theorem, a problem that has been around since 1637 when Pierre de Fermat wrote it into the margin of one of his books[1], was finally proved in 1993 by Andrew Wiles. But only a handful of people in the entire world can understand the proof, to the rest of us, it's utterly incomprehensible, and yet we are quite happy to announce that "Fermat's Last Theorem has been proved". We have to believe the experts who tell us it has been, because we can't tell for ourselves.

            In no other field of science would this be good enough. If a physicist told us that light rays are bent by gravity, as Einstein did, then we would insist on experiments to back up the theory. Mathematics therefore occupies a special place, where we believe anyone who claims to have proved a theorem on the say-so of just a few people - that is, until we hear otherwise. The point here is authority. The proofs of Mathematical and Scientific discoveries can be so complicated, or too difficult to reconstruct, that we have to trust the hands of the scientists and mathematicians behind the proof. This leads to so-called ‘accepted knowledge’; we hear from the experts that Columbus discovered America, until the contrary is proven. The problem is then, as we have seen, that on the right premises, wrong results can aspire.