Fermat’s Last Theorem

Abstract

This is a brief and informal overview of the more than 350 year old history of the Diophantine equation known commonly as Fermat’s Last Theorem. There are now several discussions of this history in the literature. For elementary expositions, the reader is referred, for example, to the articles of Gouvea [G], K.Murty [KM1] and Ribenboim [R]. For more advanced and elaborate expositions, the reader may consult the conference proceedings edited by Coates[C], the exposition of Darmon, Diamond and R. Taylor [DDT], the seminar proceedings edited by K. Murty [KM2], and the course notes of R. Murty [RM]. There will soon be proceedings of two more conferences organized around the theme of Fermat’s Last Theorem. These are the Boston conference, being edited by Cornell, Silverman and Stevens [CSS] and the Bangalore workshop being edited by K. Guruprasad and R. Murty [GM]. All of these volumes also have references to the literature to guide the reader towards further study. Finally, there are of course the original articles of Ribet [Ri], Wiles [W] and Taylor and Wiles [TW] which contain the proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem.

To Professor K.R. Parthasarathy

Steacie Fellow. Research partially supported by an NSERC grant.