Tuesday, October 12, 2004

Fermat's Last Theorem

Have you known that Fermat's last Theorem has been proven in 1994 by Andrew Wiles, a british mathematician working at University of Princeton, USA. He got his Ph.D from Univesity of Cambridge, UK. See http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/HistTopics/Fermat's_last_theorem.html

Pierre de Fermat (1601 - 1665) is a french lawyer (yes, a lawyer!) who pursued maths in his spare time. He is most famous for scribbling a note in the margin of a book by Diophantus that he had discovered a proof that the equation xn+yn = zn has no integer solutions for n>2. He stated "I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this, which however the margin is not large enough to contain." The proposition, which came to be known as Fermat's last theorem, baffled all attempts to prove it until A. Wiles succeeded in 1995.

For detail, see http://mathworld.wolfram.com/FermatsLastTheorem.html

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