A funny yarn about one Jeremy Shaffery, an astronomer who idolizes Einstein and his methods and who wants to achieve immortal fame by doing something just as famous. The problem is that he is not built for this (“The Einstein method, which he had studied assiduously over many years, was to make a pretty theory and then see if, by any chance, observations of events in the real world seemed to confirm it. Shaffery greatly approved of that method. It just didn't seem to work out for him.”). As his wife says with a bite,

In a desperate moment, he starts trying to prove Fermat's Last Theorem (“It was one of those famous mathematical problems that grad students played at for a month or two and amateurs assaulted in vain all their lives. It looked easy enough to deal with.”). A description of the problem with analogy to Pythagoras theorem and the reference to Fermat's margin note follows. In fact, Shaffery has half a mind to just write a similar margin note but discards the idea for a few reasons (people would not take it seriously, it would be posthumous, etc). He tries out some desperate methods before other events take over. In the end, he achieves non-mathematical fame in an unwitting pandemic he causes which destroys most of the world's population…