FERMAT'S LAST THEOREM

also called Fermat's Great Theorem the statement that there are no natural numbers x, y, and z such that xn + yn = zn, in which n is a natural number greater than 2. About this the 17th-century mathematician Pierre Fermat wrote in 1637 in his copy of Claude-Gaspar Bachet's translation of Diophantus' Arithmetica, I have discovered a truly remarkable proof but this margin is too small to contain it. Mathematicians long were baffled by the statement, for they were unable either to prove or to disprove it, although the statement had been proved for many specific values of n. Using sophisticated tools from algebraic geometry, the English mathematician Andrew Wiles, with help from his former student, Richard Taylor, devised a proof of Fermat's last theorem that was published in 1995 in the journal Annals of Mathematics.