Did you know the number 26 is rather special? It is the only number that sits directly between a square number (25 or 5 2) and a cube number (27 or 3 3). And to be clear, it’s not merely that we’ve ...

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 ...

Mathematician Kevin Buzzard of Imperial College London is training computers how to prove one of the most famous problems in math history: Fermat’s last theorem. Resolving the problem isn’t the point.

As a boy, Wiles discovered Fermat’s Last Theorem and vowed to be the one to solve it. Decades later, already a Princeton professor, he set out on a secret mission to prove the Taniyama-Shimura ...