this post was submitted on 26 May 2026
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Dropping the societal expectations of our time, one who has an aptitude for math in a post scarcity environment could simply choose to pursue some avenue therein. You'd think that would still have to be a large portion of focus, but we can give Picard some benefit of the doubt for being good at whatever field, plus his other hobbies and interests.
picard is free to pursue his hobbies, but math on this level is not a hobby. it is a full time work for which picard has neither education, nor the time. it is not like you stare at the blank paper for a 30 minutes a day hoping something will happen.
Wiles was working on a completely different problem, which ultimately clicked for him and allowed him to transfer the findings to the FLT. but he was a person with really specialized knowledge that he spent long time acquiring.
this whole argument is like showing picard doing some advanced neurosurgery that no neurosurgeon in a known universe can do, just to kill some time between bridge shift and holodeck, because why not, he passed the basic medical in a starfleet academy, so why couldn't he pick up a hobby? it would be immediately clear how absurd such scene would be.
You don't have to be Wiles to attempt unsuccessfully to prove the theorem. Fermat famously claimed to have a simple and elegant proof. Before we understood how to actually prove it, there was always a small chance that maybe there was such a proof and all we needed was the right type of creative lateral thinking to rediscover it. That's what Picard was doing. Now that we understand the problem better, nobody really thinks such a proof exists, but that wasn't as well known at the time the episode was written.
that's incorrect. there were attempts at a proof by lame and kummer around the half of 19th century and no later than that people were aware that mentioned fermat's notice was probably bullshit - he either made a mistake, or had proof for some narrow case which he wrongly assumed was general proof.
it was clear at that point that there is no proof that would be discoverable by someone without proper mathematical education just because he "had an idea".
you can of course argue that doesn't mean picard couldn't attempt that, but it is quite a stretch. reality is, that some writer read about it somewhere and incorporated it into the script without thinking about it twice and as a result gave us this joke, because - well - predicting future is hard.