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510-OLI-A

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Indonesia

978-1-4471-4095-5

510

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Mathematical science is the queen of sciences, and arithmetic is the queen of mathematics”, Gauss said. Indeed, number theory is the study of whole numbers, also called positive integers, the first ones we learn at school. Thus, the theory of numbers deals with problems that are often both easy to understand and very hard to solve. For instance, one of the most famous number theory problems is Fermat’s last theorem, abbreviated as FLT, stating that the Fermat equation xn + yn = zn, where x, y, z are positive integers and n  3 is an integer, has no solution. This proof came from Andrew Wiles in 1995, after more than 350 years of efforts from many mathematicians, such as Ernst Kummer, Sophie Germain, André Weil, JeanPierre Serre, Gerd Faltings, Kenneth Ribet and Yves Hellegouarch.

Olivier Bordiles