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Fermat's Last Theorem (also called Fermat's Great Theorem) states that there are no positive natural numbers x, y, and z such that

x + y = z

in which n is a natural number greater than 2. About this the 17th-century mathematician Pierre de Fermat wrote in 1637 in his copy of Claude-Gaspar Bachet's translation of Diophantus' Arithmetica, "I have discovered a truly remarkable proof but this margin is too small to contain it". The reason why this statement is so significant is that all the other theorems proposed by Fermat were settled either by proofs he supplied, or by more rigorous proof supplied afterword. Mathematicians long were baffled by this statement, for they were unable either to prove or to disprove it. The theorem has the credit of most number of wrong proofs!

Using sophisticated tools from algebraic geometry (in particular elliptic curves and modular forms) and building on the Taniyama-Shimura Conjecture and the Epsilon Conjecture, the English mathematician Andrew Wiles, with help from his former student Richard Taylor, devised a proof of Fermat's Last Theorem that was published in 1995 in the journal Annals of Mathematics.

The story of the proof in of itself is almost as remarkable as the mystery of the theorem itself. Wiles spent 7 years in isolation working out nearly all the details. When he presented his proof, had blown away his audience with the number of ideas and constructions used in his proof. Unfortunately, upon closer inspection a serious problem was discovered which seemed to break his original proof. Wiles then spent about a year trying to repair his proof. In the end he resurrected the proof with some techniques he used in his earlier work and apparently created an even more elegant proof as a result.

There is some doubt over whether the "..truly remarkable proof .." of Fermat's was correct. The methods used by Wiles were unknown when Fermat was writing, and it seems unlikely that Fermat managed to derive all the necessary mathematics to demonstrate the same solution (in the words of Andrew Wiles, "its impossible, this is a 20th century proof"). The alternatives are that there is a simpler proof that all other mathematicians up until this point have missed, or that Fermat was mistaken.

See also:

• Euler's conjecture.

• Fermats little theorem