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 ...

Fermat's Little Theorem offers an elegant probabilistic shortcut for detecting prime numbers, but a strange class of ...

Fermat's Last Theorem—the idea that a certain simple equation had no solutions— went unsolved for nearly 350 years until Oxford mathematician Andrew Wiles created a proof in 1995. Now, Case Western ...

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 ...

See more of our trusted coverage when you search. Prefer Newsweek on Google to see more of our trusted coverage when you search. I have found a truly wonderful proof which this margin [of my notebook] ...

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 ...

On June 23, 1993, the mathematician Andrew Wiles gave the last of three lectures detailing his solution to Fermat’s last theorem, a problem that had remained unsolved for three and a half centuries.