Saturday, March 26, 2016

Fermat's Last Theorem Prize Approved

It was a problem that had baffled mathematicians for centuries -- until British professor Andrew Wiles set his mind to it.

"There are no whole number solutions to the equation xn + yn = zn when n is greater than 2."

Otherwise known as "Fermat's Last Theorem," this equation was first posed by French mathematician Pierre de Fermat in 1637, and had stumped the world's brightest minds for more than 300 years.

In the 1990s, Oxford professor Andrew Wiles finally solved the problem, and this week was awarded the hugely prestigious 2016 Abel Prize -- including a $700,000 windfall.

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Wednesday, March 16, 2016

Mathematicians Discover Prime Conspiracy

Two mathematicians have uncovered a simple, previously unnoticed property of prime numbers — those numbers that are divisible only by 1 and themselves. Prime numbers, it seems, have decided preferences about the final digits of the primes that immediately follow them.

Among the first billion prime numbers, for instance, a prime ending in 9 is almost 65 percent more likely to be followed by a prime ending in 1 than another prime ending in 9.

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