fighting music w/ noise

“ It was the one of the greatest parties the mathematical community had ever seen this century — after all, it wasn't as if he didn't deserve it. It was not every day that a problem like Fermat's last theorem was solved, and a grand ceremony was in order to properly welcome him as a full-fledged theorem.

It was an emotional occasion, it couldn't be denied. The Four color theorem started a toast, and Hilbert's problems all shed a tear when the Poincaré conjecture welcomed the guest of honor with open arms.

And yet, the atmosphere was slightly subdued for such an occasion. It couldn't be helped; after all, mathematics had never been the same since those young upstarts known as Gödel's incompleteness theorems had shown up. Besides, such a notorious name was bound to attract ill feelings. One couldn't help but notice the furtive glares coming from the Riemann hypothesis and Goldbach's conjecture, as the latter muttered something about "heuristic justification".

"Bah! What's all this about elliptic curves and modular forms? You call that a good proof? Back in the old days, we had none of this fancy balderash!" scoffed Pythagoras' theorem from his corner. He was an old crank, everyone know. The oldest, in fact. He'd been one of the first theorems, after all, and the most famous.

"Did you, now?" Quadratic reciprocity approached, smiling. She was showing off one of her eight proofs by Gauss for the occasion, flaunting her Legendre symbols as she always did. She casually picked an infinite number of pretzels from an infinite number of bowls, choosing one from each. The axiom of choice made things so convenient, these days. "Please, you've been saying the same things ever since trigonometric functions became fashionable. And how long ago was that?"

"Oh, as if I'm going to listen to the likes of you," spat Pythagoras' theorem. "Just because someone called you the 'fundamental theorem' you think you can come along and tell us old timers what to do what to do! And all just because you were close with Gauss. Do you think I don't know what he called you in private? The 'golden the—"

"Why, you little–" sputtered Quadratic reciprocity. Her quadratic residues (mod p) trembled in rage as she took a step forward, and—

"Aaah!"

Everyone turned their heads at the commotion outside, where the children had been playing football in 3-dimensional space with the lemmas and the corollaries. Fermat's last theorem rushed out to his younger brother, Fermat's little theorem, who sat staring in confusion at the objects in his hands.

The solid ball they'd been playing with had split into into several non-overlapping pieces and then be put back together into two identical copies of the original ball.

"Oops," said the Banach-Tarski paradox with a sheepish grin. "My bad." ”

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