Please note that the list below only shows forthcoming events, which may not include regular events that have not yet been entered for the forthcoming term. Please see the past events page for a list of all seminar series that the department has on offer.

 

Past events in this series


Thu, 05 Mar 2026
16:00
Lecture Room 4

How to prove Fermat's Last Theorem

Kevin Buzzard
(Imperial College London)
Abstract

Over 30 years has passed since the original proof of Fermat's Last Theorem by Wiles and Taylor—Wiles. There are now several proofs known to humanity, and I'm currently teaching one of them to a computer. This made me try to find out what the most ergonomic route was nowadays, and I found it by asking Richard Taylor what it was. In the talk I will summarise how to prove Fermat's Last Theorem in 2026, highlighting the differences between the modern method and the original route discovered by Wiles (we do use p=3, but in a different way). I won't talk much at all about Lean and essentially none of the work I will present is my own; this will just be a standard number theory seminar, and probably everything in it will already be known to the experts, but hopefully younger people will learn something.