Lillian B. Pierce

The 2023 Women and Mathematics Program took place from May 21–26, bringing together 31 students, educators, and researchers from universities around the world to participate in a series of lectures, problem sessions, research seminars, and special talks around the theme "Patterns in Integers."

"Lillian Pierce vividly remembers a moment when she was 4 years old, waiting in her family’s station wagon for her older brother and sister to get out of school, magnolia trees forming pink and white arches overhead. Her mother was sitting in the driver’s seat, writing sequences of numbers in blue ink, balancing her checkbook. Pierce was mesmerized."

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...