Million-Dollar Math Puzzles

Mathematics gives some of the most dramatic examples of the glacial but inexorable advance of the human intellect. For example, in 1994 British mathematician Andrew Wiles revealed his proof of Fermat's last theorem. Wiles used esoteric mathematical tools like elliptical equations, unheard of when Pierre de Fermat first scribbled the problem in the margin of a book 350 years earlier. "I have a truly marvelous proof of this proposition, which this margin is too narrow to contain," Fermat had claimed. He died before his note was discovered, his proof apparently unwritten. For seven years, Wiles toiled secretly in his attic; only his wife knew that he was unraveling one of math's most enduring mysteries.