Have you ever went through a wild goose chase? Trolled into looking for something that was ​never there? Well then you'd understand how generations of mathematicians, spanning more than three centuries felt as they became part of the mathematical world's greatest practical joke: Pierre de Fermat's last theorem.

​U mad bro?

Lets face it, we'd like to think we're the greatest living thing on the Planet, but we know we're not. We may be able to smelt metals, generate electricity, and even split atoms; but those are nothing compared to a plant's ability to use light to manufacture the complex chemicals that keeps this planet teeming with life.

If you still scoff at this notion, then prepare to be humbled.

Every time Intel or AMD releases a new processor, the technogeeks amongst us rave on how many transistors they had crammed into it. The number used to be in the thousands, then millions, and now billions. But what are these things that we associated with power, speed and better gaming experience?

These humble devices have a unique history, and without it much of our civilisation would not have existed.

So the Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro has concluded, and I'm sure many of you are rooting for specific events. For myself, it's the athletics, there's something about pushing the human limit of speed with nothing but muscle power that epitomises our obsession with achievements.

Zeno had thought of this - he is Greek after all, and proposes an extraordinary race that shapes our understanding of mathematics and physics, even today.

We have taken much of the things in our life for granted, and the pursuit for the latest and greatest makes us forget how we even got to where we are. The computer being one of them, many of us had assumed that prior to the 1980s, the world was in the tech equivalent of the stone age, but not so.

Similar to our article on the analogue calculator, in this article we shall go back to the time when simple gears and clockwork perform the most amazing tasks. And we'll see how we might one day go back to that.