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 ...

Completed only a few days before the death of Arthur C. Clarke, "The Last Theorem" is a paean to the elegance of mathematics and the power of the scientific method. Co-written with veteran science ...

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 ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. Ewan Spence covers the digital worlds of mobile technology. Just before his death, Pierre de Fermat sealed his place in history ...

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The most exciting part of “The Last Theorem” (Del Rey: 304 pp., $27), the novel by the late Arthur C. Clarke and fellow science fiction veteran Frederik Pohl, has nothing to do with the titular ...

When Andrew Wiles received the £500,000 Abel Prize for mathematics last week, there was a general sense of “At last!” in the mathematical community. After all, Professor Wiles had already won almost ...

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 ...

In an episode of The Simpson’s called The Wizard of Evergreen Terrace, Homer appears to write a valid solution to defeat Fermat’s Last Theorem on a blackboard. But given that Fermat’s last theorem is ...