Fermat numbers have what mathematicians sometimes describe as a “beautiful mathematical form,” involving powers of 2. They were of interest 400 years ago and are now the subject of a wide-ranging ...

Samuel Arbesman recently wrote about incorrect mathematical conjectures. I wanted to add one of my favorites, which came up in my math history class a couple weeks ago. Unlike the disproven ...

Sometimes work in one discipline of pure mathematics has a completely unexpected payoff in another. Some of the famous mathematician Pierre de Fermat’s (1601–1665) work in number theory bears this out ...

Joyeux anniversaire, Pierre de Fermat! Today is the French mathematician's 410th birthday. Fermat is best known as the originator or Fermat's Last Theorem, which consists of a deceptively ...

Simon Singh likes to work against the grain. He decides to write about a mathematical problem that gained iconic status because of a teasing, 300-year-old note in the margin of a book, but won't seem ...

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 ...

Mathematicians have shown Fermat's Last Theorem can be proved using only a small portion of Grothendieck's work. Specifically, the theorem can be justified using "finite order arithmetic." Fermat's ...