On Fermat's Last Theorem

In 1986 AndrewWiles published a ground-breaking proof of Fermat's Last Theorem. But in spite of the rarity and the significance of the achievement, the underlying reasoning is so convoluted that it would be extremely difficult -if not impossible- for any but a tiny minority of specialists to understand it. Most must simply take the word of Wiles and his fellow experts that Fermat's Last Theorem has been proved. But the conjecture itself -that no 3 positive integers can satisfy the equation x^n + y^n = z^n for any positive-integer value of n greater than 2- is so simple that a school child could understand it, and Fermat himself claimed that he possessed a proof, one that -if it existed- must have been expressed in the language of 17th century mathematics, and the language of 21st century high school mathematics. Yet there can be no such proof: this note outlines a complimentary but alternative argument to that employed by Wiles that shows why no 17th century proof of the theorem is possible.