Statement that there are no natural numbers x , y , and z such that x n + y n = z n , in which n is a natural number greater than 2.
About this, Pierre de Fermat wrote in 1637 in his copy of Diophantus's Arithmetica , "I have discovered a truly remarkable proof but this margin is too small to contain it." Although the theorem was subsequently shown to be true for many specific values of n , leading to important mathematical advances in the process, the difficulty of the problem soon convinced mathematicians that Fermat never had a valid proof. In 1995 the British mathematician Andrew Wiles (b. 1953) and his former student Richard Taylor (b. 1962) published a complete proof, finally solving one of the most famous of all mathematical problems.