Fermat's last theorem (redirected from Fermat's conjecture)

Fermat's last theorem

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, 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.