Andrew Wiles worked secretly and mostly alone to solve Fermat's Last Theorem. Despite his proof offered in 1994, no one has yet found the proof that Pierre de Fermat claimed to possess because no one has found a proof that used the mathematics and mathematical tools available to Fermat in the seventeenth century.

The proof of Fermat's Last Theorem involves two people separated by over 350 years. The first is the French lawyer and mathematician Pierre de Fermat, who, in about 1637, left a note written in the margin of a book. His note said that the equation aⁿ + bⁿ = cⁿ has no solutions when a, b, and c are whole numbers and n is a whole number greater than 2. The note went on to say that he had marvelous proof of this statement, but the book margin was too...