Like many math students, I had dreams of mathematical greatness. I thought I was close once. A difficult algebra problem in college kept me working late into the night. After hours of struggle, I felt ...

Mathematicians have shown Fermat's Last Theorem can be proved using only a small portion of Grothendieck's work. Specifically, the theorem can be justified using "finite order arithmetic." Fermat's ...

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.

We note that one more factor is missing from Table 1 in Björn—Riesel, Factors of generalized Fermat numbers, Math. Comp. 67 (1998), 441—446, in addition to the three already reported upon in ...

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 ...

James M. Vaughn Jr., wielding a fortune, argues that he brought about the Fermat breakthrough after the best and brightest had failed for centuries to solve the puzzle. James M. Vaughn Jr., president ...