Science News, June 20th, 1987
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 de Fermat. Although he had a wonderful proof for the theorem, Fermat wrote in the book's margin, he didn't have enough room to write it out. After Fermat's death, scholars could find no trace of the proof in any of his papers, and ever since, mathematicians have struggled in vain to solve the problem. Some recent mathematical discoveries...
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