Okay, so Jean-Luc Picard isn't always right. A Reddit user watching some old Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes points out this curious quirk from one of the show's uneven early seasons.

In the opening of "The Royale," Commander Riker walks in on the captain ruminating on Fermat's Last Theorem, remarking that a problem posed by a "part-time French mathematician" in the 17th century remains unsolved in the 24th. One problem, though. The infamous math problem was actually solved in 1994.

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Fermat's Last Theorem is perhaps the prime example of a problem that's easy to state but deadly difficult to solve. Remember the Pythagorean Theorem for solving right triangles, that x2 + y2 = z2? It has a whole host of solutions—sets of three numbers that are called Pythagorean triples, the simplest being 3, 4, and 5. Back in the 1600s, Fermat was trying to figure out if the equation would work out for exponents greater than 2. The question is: Is there any whole number solution for xn + yn = zn?

Fermat couldn't find one, and he wrote that there is no solution. He also claimed in the margin of a book that he had some kind of fantastic proof. But while the theorem was found after Fermat's death, nobody ever found the proof and the problem went unsolved for centuries.

The Star Trek: The Next Generation writers probably figured Fermat's Last Theorem would go on being a mystery for many centuries more. So they introduced it into the 1989 episode as an excuse for Picard to comment on how even the marvels of 24th century tech aren't enough to solve a problem posed by a Frenchman with no computer. But in 1994—five years after "The Royale" first aired on TV, when TNG was about to end its run—Andrew Wiles released the first successful proof of the theorem.

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Trek isn't the only show with love for Fermat. As Simon Singh explains in the above video, The Simpsons like to play with math problems. In multiple episodes, the show displays an apparent solution to Fermat's Last Theorem, but it's actually one of many "near misses" that doesn't quite work out if you look at the entire number.

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