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 ...

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 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 “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 ...

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 ...

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.

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 ...

Goro Shimura, Princeton's Michael Henry Strater University Professor of Mathematics, Emeritus, died on Friday, May 3, in Princeton, New Jersey. He was 89. “Goro Shimura was a major research ...

His work was one of the most stunning results in modern mathematics – and now he’s won one of the biggest prizes in the field. Andrew Wiles of the University of Oxford, who in the 1990s cracked the ...