27th June

On this day in 1908, the Göttingen Academy of Sciences announced a prize of one hundred thousand marks, from the will of Paul Wolfskehl, for a proof of Fermat's last theorem. Thousands of attempts at a proof were submitted. The prize would have been worth about a million pounds in today's money, but when Andrew Wiles collected the prize in 1997 it was about 75 000 DM.