Like many math students, I had dreams of mathematical greatness. I thought I was close once. A difficult algebra problem in college kept me working late into the night. After hours of struggle, I felt ...

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.

Mathematicians have shown Fermat's Last Theorem can be proved using only a small portion of Grothendieck's work. Specifically, the theorem can be justified using "finite order arithmetic." Fermat's ...

Andrew Wiles devoted much of his entire career to proving Fermat's Last Theorem, the world's most famous mathematical problem. In 1993, he made front-page headlines ...