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  • To divide a cube into two other cubes, a fourth power, or in general any power whatever into two powers of the same denomination above the second is impossible, and I have assuredly found an admirable proof of this, but the margin is too narrow to contain it.

    Scribbled note in the margins of his copy of Diophantus's Arithmetica. He did not live to provide the promised proof, and the conjecture became famous as Fermat's Last Theorem. In 1993 Andrew Wiles, a British mathematician, claimed to have discovered the proof.
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