The Proof of the Beal’s Conjecture

The cover of this issue of the Bulletin is the frontispiece to a volume of Samuel de Fermat's 1670 edition of Bachet's Latin translation of Diophantus’s Arithmetica. This edition includes the marginalia of the editor's father, Pierre de Fermat. Among these notes one finds the elder Fermat's extraordinary comment in connection with the Pythagorean equation the marginal comment that hints at the existence of a proof (a demonstratio sane mirabilis) of what has come to be known as Fermat's Last Theorem. Diophantus's work had fired the imagination of the Italian Renaissance mathematician Rafael Bombelli, as it inspired Fermat a century later.