In June of 1993, the British mathematician Andrew Wiles (b. 1953) delivered a series of lectures on “Modular Forms, Elliptic Curves, and Galois Representations.” Though the audience was not large—the topic required a large amount of background knowledge—it had grown beyond expectations. It was rumored that Wiles would announce something […]
Tag: Fermat
The Birth of Probability
Imagine you are gambling on coin flips with a friend, one of you choosing heads and the other tails. You each stake ten dollars, agreeing that the first player to get five favorable flips wins all the money. But after two heads and four tails, a family member calls you […]