FIGURE 55. Pierre de Fermat.Anteater: Anyway, who needs to see n written out decimally? Achilles has
just told us how to find it. Well, Mr. T, please accept my hearty
felicitations, on the occasion of your epoch-making discovery!
Tortoise: Thank you. But what I feel is more important than the result
itself is the practical use to which my result immediately led.
Crab: I am dying to hear about it, since I always thought number theory
was the Queen of Mathematin.-the purest branch of mathematics-
the one branch of mathematics which has NO applications!
Tortoise: You're not the only one with that belief, but in fact it is quite
impossible to make a blanket statement about when or how some
branch-or even some individual Theorem-of pure mathematics will
have important repercussiom outside of mathematics. It is quite
unpredictable-and this case is a perfect example of that phenome-
non.
Achilles: Mr. Tortoise's double-barreled result has created a breakthrough
in the field of acoustico-retrieval!
Anteater: What is acoustico-retrieyal?
Achilles: The name tells it all: it is the retrieval of acoustic information
from extremely complex sources. A typical task of acoustico-retrieval is
to reconstruct the sound which a rock made on plummeting into a lake
from the ripples which spread out over the lake's surface.
Crab: Why, that sounds next to impossible!
Achilles: Not so. It is actually quite similar to what one's brain does, when it
reconstructs the sound made in the vocal cords of another person from
the vibrations transmitted by the eardrum to the fibers in the cochlea.
Crab: I see. But I still don't see where number theory enters the picture,
or what this all has to do with my new records.
(^278) Prelude ...