Fermat's last theorem is one of the most famous theorems of mathematics. It was first stated by the brilliant amateur mathematician Pierre de Fermat, but it wasn't proved until more than 350 years later. Over the centuries it provided a tantalizing...

Fermat's Last Theorem Andrew Wiles worked secretly and mostly alone to solve Fermat's Last Theorem. Despite his proof offered in 1994, no one has yet found the proof that Pierre de Fermat claimed to possess because no one has found a proof...

Pierre de Fermat (1601-1665) was a contemporary of the renowned philosopher and mathematician René Descartes (1596-1650). Fermat, like Descartes, was fascinated with numbers and their properties and relationships, and indeed corresponded with...

But one cannot split a cube into two cubes, nor a fourth power into two fourth powers, nor in general any power in infinitum beyond the square into two like powers. I have uncovered a marvelous demonstration indeed of this, but the narrowness of the...

Closing in on Fermat's last theorem One of the most famous unsolved problems in mathematicsstarted out as a note scrawled in the margin of a book. Now known as Fermat's last theorem, the problem was first proposed by 17th-century French mathematician Pierre...

When Andrew Wiles of Princeton University proved Fermat's last theorem several years ago, he relied on recently discovered links between Pierre de Fermat's centuries-old conjecture concerning whole numbers and the theory of so-called elliptic curves (SN: 11/5/94, p. 295). Establishing the validity of...