On June 23, 1993, the mathematician Andrew Wiles gave the last of three lectures detailing his solution to Fermat’s last theorem, a problem that had remained unsolved for three and a half centuries.

For more than 350 years, a mathematics problem whose solution was considered the Holy Grail to the greatest mathematician minds had remained unsolved. Now, a team of mathematicians led by a prominent ...

Fermat’s Last Theorem is so simple to state, but so hard to prove. Though the 350-year-old claim is a straightforward one about integers, the proof that University of Oxford mathematician Andrew Wiles ...

Pierre de Fermat left behind a truly tantalizing hint of a proof when he died—one that mathematicians struggled to complete for centuries. François de Poilly, wikimedia commons The story is familiar ...

The proof Wiles finally came up with (helped by Richard Taylor) was something Fermat would never have dreamed up. It tackled the theorem indirectly, by means of an enormous bridge that mathematicians ...

British professor Sir Andrew Wiles was awarded mathematics’ most prestigious prize this week, for providing the proof to a theorem that had stymied everyone in the field for over 350 years. Wiles was ...

Here's a scene from "The Royale," an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation that aired March 27, 1989. In it, Captain Jean-Luc Picard tells his First Officer, Commander Riker, about his work in ...

It was a problem that had baffled mathematicians for centuries – until British professor Andrew Wiles set his mind to it. “There are no whole number solutions to the equation xn + yn = zn when n is ...

Maxine Calle is a 2023 AAAS Mass Media Fellow at The Conversation U.S. and she receives funding from the National Science Foundation. David Bressoud does not work for, consult, own shares in or ...

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