Joyeux anniversaire, Pierre de Fermat! Today is the French mathematician's 410th birthday. Fermat is best known as the originator or Fermat's Last Theorem, which consists of a deceptively ...

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 ...

19th-century mathematicians thought the “roots of unity” were the key to solving Fermat’s Last Theorem. Then they discovered a fatal flaw. Sometimes the usual numbers aren’t enough to solve a problem.

The mathematics problem he solved had been lingering since 1637 – and he first read about it when he was just 10 years old. This week, British professor Andrew Wiles, 62, got prestigious recognition ...

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 ...

In 1994, an earthquake of a proof shook up the mathematical world. The mathematician Andrew Wiles had finally settled Fermat’s Last Theorem, a central problem in number theory that had remained open ...

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 ...

British number theorist Andrew Wiles has received the 2016 Abel Prize for his solution to Fermat’s last theorem — a problem that stumped some of the world’s greatest minds for three and a half ...

Sometimes work in one discipline of pure mathematics has a completely unexpected payoff in another. Some of the famous mathematician Pierre de Fermat’s (1601–1665) work in number theory bears this out ...