Cox, David A. Introduction to Fermat’s Last Theorem. (English) Zbl 0849.11002 Am. Math. Mon. 101, No. 1, 3-14 (1994). In this attractively written introduction, completed in late 1993, the author recalls some of the history of Fermat’s Last Theorem, and briefly mentions basic notions about elliptic curves and modular functions relevant to the proof of Fermat’s last theorem as had recently been announced by Wiles. Useful ‘boxes’ highlight notions likely to be new to the reader; they include a brief summary of various conjectures from diophantine geometry and concerning arithmetic surfaces, as well as the modularity conjecture for elliptic curves over \(\mathbb{Q}\), imply Fermat’s Last Theorem. The article concludes with a nice elementary explanation of Ribet’s level reduction essential for connecting the theory of elliptic curves to the FLT. Reviewer: A.J.van der Poorten (North Ryde) Cited in 5 Documents MSC: 11-02 Research exposition (monographs, survey articles) pertaining to number theory 11G05 Elliptic curves over global fields 11D41 Higher degree equations; Fermat’s equation 11F11 Holomorphic modular forms of integral weight 14H52 Elliptic curves Keywords:Frey curve; Taniyama-Shimura conjecture; survey; Fermat’s Last Theorem; elliptic curves; modular functions; level reduction PDFBibTeX XMLCite \textit{D. A. Cox}, Am. Math. Mon. 101, No. 1, 3--14 (1994; Zbl 0849.11002) Full Text: DOI