Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Andrew Wiles, the mathematician who presented a proof of Fermat's last theorem back in 1993, stands next to the famous result. AP ...

Simon Singh spotted the equation on a Homer Simpson blackboard. Had Homer just solved one of the toughest puzzles in math? His solution, crazily,... You don't have to notice, but if you do, it's like ...

Fermat’s Last Theorem is one of the most famous problems in mathematical history. Proposed in the 17th century, it claimed that certain equations have no solutions in whole numbers. For centuries, ...

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 ...

WHO: James M. Vaughn Jr., heir to a fortune generated by the oil gushers of East Texas; English mathematician Sir Andrew Wiles; and seventeenth-century French amateur mathematician Pierre de Fermat.

Pierre de Fermat left behind a truly tantalizing hint of a proof when he died—one that mathematicians struggled to complete for centuries. François de Poilly, wikimedia commons The story is familiar ...

In 1637, Pierre de Fermat scribbled a note on a textbook margin that would baffle mathematicians for more than three centuries. And that’s all he wrote. Fermat died before supplying the missing proof ...