About 350 years ago, a French amateur mathematician named Pierre de Fermat scratched a devilishly tricky problem in the margin of a Greek mathematical text. Then he added, "I have discovered a truly remarkable proof ((of the theorem)), which this margin is too small to contain." Did he really have the answer? The attempts of generations of scientists to find out have made Fermat's Last Theorem the El Dorado of math problems. Now, at long last, an assistant professor at Tokyo Metropolitan University seems to have broken the code. Last month at Bonn's Max Planck Institute, Yoichi Miyaoka, 38, sketched out...
Education: Solving The Puzzle
Subscriber content preview.
or
Log-In
To continue reading:
or
Log-In