Bloggers from the past

I have been reading Fermat's Last Theorem by Simon Singh today in preparation for a workshop I'm attending in the London School of Economics in April. I bought the book for my husband a few years ago and although he said he'd enjoyed it I have not got round to reading it myself until now. I'm finding it extremely interesting and surprisingly entertaining. Basically it is about a theorem, or more correctly a conjecture, which one Pierre de Fermat (a seventeenth century judge and amateur mathematician) claimed to have proved in the margin of a book (specifically a Latin translation of Arithmetica by Diophantus). Unfortunately, because Fermat loved to tease (and was also too impatient to painstakingly write out his proofs) the actual proof was never recorded or found.

This is reminding me strongly of another genius I have just finished reading about in Genius in the Shadows by William Lanouette. He was called Leo Szilard, a twentieth century physicist who thought of many original things during his strange but fascinating life. Like Fermat he was always anxious to move on. One of his friends described him as being like a bumble bee, going from one flower to the next. In Szilard's case the sort of pollen he left was advice. He lived most of his life from two suitcases, refusing to settle down, hovering from hotel to rented room, living just for his work.

I am convinced that both of these people would be bloggers if they lived today. Fermat would post up his postulates and challenge the rest of the world to solve them; whereas Szilard would post up advice (which was generally sound) to anyone willing to listen. 'You should try a different sort of graphite,' he'd say, ' and keep the temperature low.'