The Math Whiz behind the bar

The Herald Journal (Logan, Utah)
Wednesday, January 19, 2005

By Pat Bohm Trostle

If you’ve ever wondered what was going through the mind of the man
serving drinks behind the bar, know that you wouldn’t have a chance of
guessing right if the bar were Sultan’s Tavern and the man Ara
Shahbazian.

The longtime owner of Sultan’s has just come up with a try at solving
one of the most famous mathematical puzzlers of the last four
centuries, Fermat’s Last Theorem.

Sitting in the quiet of Sultan’s on a weekday morning, Ara reminisced
about the long road that led him to settle in Logan. Born in Iran of
Armenian parents, Ara became quixotically interested in math when he
failed it in 10th grade.

“Mathematics was the weakest part of my education in secondary
school,” he remembered. In his school at the time, if a student failed
one course, he had to stay back a grade. Ara recalled that humiliating
time.

“The whole year, I had to sit with kids a year younger than me,” he
said. But, he continued cheerfully, “Quitters never win and winners
never quit.”

In 1983, Ara earned a bachelor’s in mathematics at Utah State
University. He followed up four years later with a second degree in
computer science.

So how does a double-degreed college graduate wind up a tavern keeper?

“I hate teaching,” he admitted. “I don’t have the patience to walk a
person through the steps.”

Asked what he thought he was good at, he exploded with laughter —
“Eating!”

And for another thing, living a full life. After graduating in 1983,
Ara celebrated by bicycling from Logan to Peekskill, N.Y. Twenty-five
hundred miles in 22 days, he recalled. And far from boring, either.

“I saw so many beautiful girls,” he said.

To mark the achievement of his computer science degree, he took a
little stroll — from Logan to Yellowstone.

As wild as that sounds, it fits with the rest of Ara’s stories about
his life. He said that when he was growing up, he was far from a model
child.

“I was the black sheep of the family. I smoked anything I could get a
hand on, I drank, womanized, skipped my classes. When I was younger, I
was not a good child. My grandpa told me once, ‘You are not
worthless. We can always use you as a bad example.'”

But Ara has few regrets about his wild, youthful times.

“It’s life, you just value life, what you do,” he said. “You had your
fun — what are you going to say — I want to give that up? That was
fun, it was my life. Everybody has skeletons hiding in the closet.”

But some of us bring our skeletons out and dance with them.

“I tell everyone in here (Sultan’s),” he said.

He learned tolerance early, growing up as a member of the Armenian
Orthodox Christian minority in the predominantly Islamic culture of
Iran.

“Moslems in Iran, in a way, they’re the most liberal people,” he
said. “Moslems are very understanding people, tolerant of other
religions.”

Although followers of Islam do not drink alcohol, Ara recalled how
Iranian law accommodated the customs of other religions.

“The Christians and the Jews — because their religions allow them to
drink, they’re allowed to produce their own alcohol for their own
consumption. So my dad and my mom, being Christians, were permitted
by law to have alcohol, to drink alcohol and to produce alcohol. But
you don’t have the right to sell it to a Moslem or take it outside of
the house, to cause a nuisance,” he explained.

Ara came to Logan to join his brother, who was studying engineering at
USU. Ara himself had left Iran to study in England for two years.

“I wanted to be with my brother,” he said, “so I was accepted at USU
and came here.”

Ara’s parents still live in Iran, although their children are
international.

“One brother lives in Vienna, Austria. He’s the brain of the family, a
writer,” said Ara. “My sister lives in Canada with her husband and
kids in Toronto. She’s a housewife.” His other brother, the engineer,
lives in Seattle, Wash.

Ara said he became interested in Fermat after browsing through a book
about math at Deseret Industries.

“I was willing to pay my 50 cents and took it home,” he said.

Fermat’s Last Theorem is a famous mathematical puzzle. Proposed by
French mathematician Pierre de Fermat more than 350 years ago, it
concerns number theory. Pythagorean numbers are sets of three
numbers, a, b and c (such as 3, 4, and 5), for which the equation a 2
+ b 2 = c 2 is true. In the margin of the chapter he was reading,
Fermat penciled a note that he had discovered a proof for a variation
of the equation, which was too long to fit in the margin. The
variation was that for whole exponents over 2, no set of positive
integers could fit the equation. For example, no positive integers, a,
b, and c, exist that would make the following equation true: a3 + b3 =
c3.

For almost 400 years, mathematicians tried to prove or find an
exception to what Fermat proposed. Andrew Wiles, an English
mathematician at Princeton University, finally proved Fermat’s theorem
in 1994. However, even those who attempted without success to solve
the problem over the years helped to make important mathematical
discoveries.

Ara believes he has proved the theorem in a much simpler way than did
Wiles, using math that was available in Fermat’s time. Four lines are
at the heart of his proof.

“I proved it four possible ways. I proved it those four possible ways
cannot hold. Since Fermat’s equations all fall in one of these four
categories, they’re all wrong. These four lines, I call them four
bars. And my method of solution, I call it ‘bar-hopping.'”

Ara waited out the burst of laughter from his listeners and continued,
“I’m not joking! I prove the first one cannot hold. Then I use the
fact that I just proved it, to prove the third one cannot hold, in
this arrangement. I use them against each other.”

However much Ara wants to confirm his proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem,
he also wants the world to believe that Fermat had been the first to
prove it.

“The one thing I want out of this,” he said, “is to give credit to
Fermat — he knew the answer. He wasn’t a liar, he wasn’t wrong in his
solution, he was a noble man.”

Ara’s proof is now in the hands of the USU Math Department, and he has
talked to department head Russell Thompson.

“The professors here are brilliant, so they can check my work.
Dr. Thompson, I appreciate his time. He said if it was right, it would
be fascinating,” Ara confided.

Another math professor, Larry Cannon, noted, “There is a long and
honorable tradition of amateurs. An amateur is one who loves, in this
case, mathematics. Fine mathematics has been done over the years by
amateurs. Fermat’s (theorem) is easy to understand, but devilishly
hard to prove. Ara is in great company … Whether or not he proves
Fermat’s (theorem), this kind of exploration and curiosity is great.”