Xinwen Zhu discusses the unifying theory of mathematics

In 1994, British mathematician Andrew Wiles successfully developed a proof for Fermat's last theorem—a proof that was once partially scribbled in a book margin by 17th-century mathematician Pierre de Fermat but subsequently eluded even the best minds for more than 300 years. Wiles's hard-won success came after digging into a vast web of mathematical conjectures called the Langlands program. The Langlands program, proposed by Canadian mathematician Robert Phelan Langlands in the 1960s, acts as a bridge between seemingly unrelated disciplines in mathematics, such as number theory—the study of prime numbers and other integers—and more visual disciplines such as geometry.

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