The treatise is mentioned in the 1893 short story "The Final Problem", when Holmes, speaking of Professor Moriarty, states: He is a man of good birth and excellent education, endowed by nature with a phenomenal mathematical faculty.
On the strength of it he won the Mathematical Chair at one of our smaller universities, and had, to all appearances, a most brilliant career before him.Moriarty was a versatile mathematician as well as a criminal mastermind.
[5][6] However, there are real academics named Moriarty, so to avoid confusion one paper distinguished the hypothetical attacker as "the author of A Treatise on the Binomial Theorem".
[5] In The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, a 1974 Holmes pastiche by Nicholas Meyer, Moriarty in conversation with Watson denies having written any treatise on the binomial theorem, saying: "Certainly not.
In this novel, Moriarty is no evil genius, but a harmless maths teacher who became a monster in Holmes' fantasies because he was involved in certain traumatic childhood experiences of his.