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 ...

IT is unfortunate that F. P. Wolfkehl's legacy of a prize for settling the vexed question of “Fermat's Last Theorem” should have stimulated such a large erroneous mathematical literature. Most of the ...

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 ...

THE “last theorem of Fermat” states that if x, y, z, p denote positive integers, the equation X p + Y p =Z p is impossible if p exceeds 2: thus ho cube can be the sum of two cubes, and so on. If the ...

This is a preview. Log in through your library . Abstract A simple and — as it seems to me — new proof of Fermat's small theorem ap≡ a (mod p) will be presented. Also the generalization of that ...

A mathematician will turn a groundbreaking 100-page proof into computer code. The proof tool, Lean, lets users turn proofs written in prose into rules and logic for testing. Kevin Buzzard already uses ...

Summary Fermat’s Last Theorem says that for integers n ≥ 2, there are no solutions to xn + yn = zn among positive integers. What about rational exponents n? Irrational n? Negative n? See what an ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. In 1994, an earthquake of a proof shook up the mathematical world. The mathematician Andrew Wiles had finally settled Fermat’s Last ...

The mathematicians who toiled on the famous enigma also devised powerful forms of end-to-end encryption. By William J. Broad Defenses against digital snoopers keep getting stronger. Encryption is what ...