Fermat's Legacy: High School Student Unlocks Prime Math Proof
High school student Daniel Larsen has proven a new theorem about Carmichael numbers, a type of not-quite-prime number, that had eluded mathematicians for decades. This theorem is related to Pierre de Fermat's "little theorem," which states that for any prime number, the quantity a^p - a is divisible by p for any integer a. While the converse of Fermat's little theorem is not true, Larsen's work explores the distribution of Carmichael numbers and builds on the research of famous mathematicians such as James Maynard and Terence Tao.