19th-century mathematicians thought the “roots of unity” were the key to solving Fermat’s Last Theorem. Then they discovered a fatal flaw. Sometimes the usual numbers aren’t enough to solve a problem.

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 ...

The mathematics problem he solved had been lingering since 1637 — and he first read about it when he was just 10 years old, during a visit to... The mathematics problem he solved had been lingering ...

British number theorist Andrew Wiles has received the 2016 Abel Prize for his solution to Fermat’s last theorem — a problem that stumped some of the world’s greatest minds for three and a half ...

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 ...

Prime numbers are all the rage these days. I can tell something’s up when random people start asking me about the randomness of primes—without even knowing that I’m a mathematician! In the past couple ...

The proof of a mathematical conjecture–even one as famous as Fermat’s last theorem–may sound like an improbable subject for an off-Broadway-style musical. Yet there’s plenty of drama and passion in ...

Can a simple mathematical pattern tell us whether a number is prime? This video explores the Fermat primality test, why it works so efficiently, and the subtle flaw that allows certain composite ...