<p>Please leave comments regarding my supplement! The Lafayette question was: Please describe an intellectual or creative interest of yours.</p>
<p>Last summer, my family rented a house for a few weeks for a well-deserved vacation. While exploring the library of the house, I stumbled upon a book titled Fermats Enigma. I had no idea what the book was about, but for some reason, I was attracted to the title, so I began to read. Unbeknownst to me, the whole book was about a mathematician, Andrew Wiles, journey to prove an equation (Fermats Last Theorem) that looked incredibly simple, but had actually been unsolved since the 19th century. Normally, I would have dropped the book as soon as I realized that its entirety was on mathematics, a subject I had no real interest in. But I soon realized that the drive and curiosity that Wiles had was mirror image to mine.
Both of us came across the problem when we were young and while reading a book. Each of us read that book as quickly as we could, because we wanted to learn as much as possible. We both continued to research the problem when we finished reading it, although he has had much more time than I have. I gave up time doing my summer reading as well as writing essays to read that book, because I was fascinated. The only problem I faced was, the math being done to prove the apparently simplistic problem, was only understood by a handful of mathematicians in the world, which left me with a problem. I need to understand how Fermats was proved, but I cant really understand it in full detail without devoting the rest of my life to math. So I took the best shortcut I could think of, and met with a few of my previous math teachers, in hopes that they could at least explain what some of the fields talked about were. Most of the topics stumped my teachers, although I was able to get some feedback from them about the general ideas of certain areas.
Although Fermats Last Theorem was proved already, I am still interested in learning more about its proof, as well as finding more unsolved/unproved equations because of their mystery. I know that I would have to devote an enormous amount of time to actually try and solve them, but with the caliber of math professors at Lafayette, I can hope to learn more about how one would go about solving them.</p>