Remembering Fermat, late at night…

 

These days,

Every evening feels

Like a filled-up page,

I don’t care to look at the words

The notes or the scribbles

Only that, the pages are filled.

 

There is little space left

To doodle a smiley here

Squiggle, or make an ink devil there

There is some space between the lines

And some along the margins

Ah - Pure filtered space of gold

 

Alas, it takes that much ink

To want to write a single word

Nor is there time  -

It is now alone

I understand the joys of Fermat:

Proof that nothing needs be proved

 

All the answers, the poems

The proofs, and promises

Are all within us

Sometimes, the margins of life

Are too narrow to contain

All that we cannot say

 

Perhaps now, in the gold dust of time

We will realise

There is not much need to say

The theorems will be proved

Sometimes, we need to shut these notebooks

And be proud of the old quiet library…

 

30^th Jan 2026

 

Pierre de Fermat, a seventeenth-century French mathematician, is remembered as much for a margin note as for his work. While reading an ancient text, he wrote that he had discovered a remarkable proof to a difficult problem, but that the space in the margin was too small to record it. This brief remark became known as Fermat’s Last Theorem and remained unproven for over three hundred years. When a proof was finally found centuries later, it was far more complex than anything Fermat could realistically have written. The episode endures as a reminder that some ideas outlive their explanations, and that absence itself can become a form of meaning.