For anyone fascinated by powers and integers, there’s no shortage of problems to tackle, whether by ingenious logic or massive computer search. In 1769, while thinking about the problem now known as ...

Fermat numbers have what mathematicians sometimes describe as a “beautiful mathematical form,” involving powers of 2. They were of interest 400 years ago and are now the subject of a wide-ranging ...

Sometimes work in one discipline of pure mathematics has a completely unexpected payoff in another. Some of the famous mathematician Pierre de Fermat’s (1601–1665) work in number theory bears this out ...