Arul Shankar

Lillian Pierce, current von Neumann Fellow in the School of Mathematics, has received a 2018 Sloan Research Fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The two-year fellowship is awarded annually to 126 early-career researchers in recognition of distinguished performance and a unique potential to make substantial contributions to their field.

In 1847, Gabriel Lamé proved Fermat’s Last Theorem. Or so he thought. Lamé was a French mathematician who had made many important discoveries. In March of that year he sensed he’d made perhaps his biggest: an elegant proof of a problem that had...