The early 20th century saw the emergence of a number of theories whose power and utility reside in large part in their generality. Typically, they are marked by an attention to the set or space of all examples of a particular kind. (Functional analysis is such an endeavour.) One of the most energetic of these general theories was that of algebraic topology. In this subject a variety of ways are developed for replacing a space by a group and a map between spaces by a map between groups. It is like using X-rays: information is lost, but the shadowy image of the original space may turn out to contain, in an accessible form, enough information to solve the question at hand.

Interest in this kind of research came from various directions. Galois’s theory of equations was an example of what could be achieved by transforming a problem in one branch of mathematics into a problem in another, more abstract branch. Another impetus came from Riemann’s theory of complex functions. He had studied algebraic functions—that is, loci defined by equations of the form f(x, y) = 0, where f is a polynomial in x whose coefficients are polynomials in y. When x and y are complex variables, the locus can be thought of as a real surface spread out over the x plane of complex numbers (today called a Riemann surface). To each value of x there correspond a finite number of values of y. Such surfaces are not easy to comprehend, and Riemann had proposed to draw curves along them in such a way that, if the surface was cut open along them, it could be opened out into a polygonal disk. He was able to establish a profound connection between the minimum number of curves needed to do this for a given surface and the number of functions (becoming infinite at specified points) that the surface could then support.

The natural problem was to see how far Riemann’s ideas could be applied to the study of spaces of higher dimension. Here two lines of inquiry developed. One emphasized what could be obtained from looking at the projective geometry involved. This point of view was fruitfully applied by the Italian school of algebraic geometers. It ran into problems, which it was not wholly able to solve, having to do with the singularities a surface can possess. Whereas a locus given by f(x, y) = 0 may intersect itself only at isolated points, a locus given by an equation of the form f(x, y, z) = 0 may intersect itself along curves, a problem that caused considerable difficulties. The second approach emphasized what can be learned from the study of integrals along paths on the surface. This approach, pursued by Charles-Émile Picard and by Poincaré, provided a rich generalization of Riemann’s original ideas.

On this base, conjectures were made and a general theory produced, first by Poincaré and then by the American engineer-turned-mathematician Solomon Lefschetz, concerning the nature of manifolds of arbitrary dimension. Roughly speaking, a manifold is the n-dimensional generalization of the idea of a surface; it is a space any small piece of which looks like a piece of n-dimensional space. Such an object is often given by a single algebraic equation in n + 1 variables. At first the work of Poincaré and of Lefschetz was concerned with how these manifolds may be decomposed into pieces, counting the number of pieces and decomposing them in their turn. The result was a list of numbers, called Betti numbers in honour of the Italian mathematician Enrico Betti, who had taken the first steps of this kind to extend Riemann’s work. It was only in the late 1920s that the German mathematician Emmy Noether suggested how the Betti numbers might be thought of as measuring the size of certain groups. At her instigation a number of people then produced a theory of these groups, the so-called homology and cohomology groups of a space.

Two objects that can be deformed into one another will have the same homology and cohomology groups. To assess how much information is lost when a space is replaced by its algebraic topological picture, Poincaré asked the crucial converse question “According to what algebraic conditions is it possible to say that a space is topologically equivalent to a sphere?” He showed by an ingenious example that having the same homology is not enough and proposed a more delicate index, which has since grown into the branch of topology called homotopy theory. Being more delicate, it is both more basic and more difficult. There are usually standard methods for computing homology and cohomology groups, and they are completely known for many spaces. In contrast, there is scarcely an interesting class of spaces for which all the homotopy groups are known. Poincaré’s conjecture that a space with the homotopy of a sphere actually is a sphere was shown to be true in the 1960s in dimensions five and above, and in the 1980s it was shown to be true for four-dimensional spaces. In 2006 Grigori Perelman was awarded a Fields Medal for proving Poincaré’s conjecture true in three dimensions, the only dimension in which Poincaré had studied it.

Developments in pure mathematics

The interest in axiomatic systems at the turn of the century led to axiom systems for the known algebraic structures, that for the theory of fields, for example, being developed by the German mathematician Ernst Steinitz in 1910. The theory of rings (structures in which it is possible to add, subtract, and multiply but not necessarily divide) was much harder to formalize. It is important for two reasons: the theory of algebraic integers forms part of it, because algebraic integers naturally form into rings; and (as Kronecker and Hilbert had argued) algebraic geometry forms another part. The rings that arise there are rings of functions definable on the curve, surface, or manifold or are definable on specific pieces of it.

Problems in number theory and algebraic geometry are often very difficult, and it was the hope of mathematicians such as Noether, who laboured to produce a formal, axiomatic theory of rings, that, by working at a more rarefied level, the essence of the concrete problems would remain while the distracting special features of any given case would fall away. This would make the formal theory both more general and easier, and to a surprising extent these mathematicians were successful.

A further twist to the development came with the work of the American mathematician Oscar Zariski, who had studied with the Italian school of algebraic geometers but came to feel that their method of working was imprecise. He worked out a detailed program whereby every kind of geometric configuration could be redescribed in algebraic terms. His work succeeded in producing a rigorous theory, although some, notably Lefschetz, felt that the geometry had been lost sight of in the process.

The study of algebraic geometry was amenable to the topological methods of Poincaré and Lefschetz so long as the manifolds were defined by equations whose coefficients were complex numbers. But, with the creation of an abstract theory of fields, it was natural to want a theory of varieties defined by equations with coefficients in an arbitrary field. This was provided for the first time by the French mathematician André Weil, in his Foundations of Algebraic Geometry (1946), in a way that drew on Zariski’s work without suppressing the intuitive appeal of geometric concepts. Weil’s theory of polynomial equations is the proper setting for any investigation that seeks to determine what properties of a geometric object can be derived solely by algebraic means. But it falls tantalizingly short of one topic of importance: the solution of polynomial equations in integers. This was the topic that Weil took up next.

The central difficulty is that in a field it is possible to divide but in a ring it is not. The integers form a ring but not a field (dividing 1 by 2 does not yield an integer). But Weil showed that simplified versions (posed over a field) of any question about integer solutions to polynomials could be profitably asked. This transferred the questions to the domain of algebraic geometry. To count the number of solutions, Weil proposed that, since the questions were now geometric, they should be amenable to the techniques of algebraic topology. This was an audacious move, since there was no suitable theory of algebraic topology available, but Weil conjectured what results it should yield. The difficulty of Weil’s conjectures may be judged by the fact that the last of them was a generalization to this setting of the famous Riemann hypothesis about the zeta function, and they rapidly became the focus of international attention.

Weil, along with Claude Chevalley, Henri Cartan, Jean Dieudonné, and others, created a group of young French mathematicians who began to publish virtually an encyclopaedia of mathematics under the name Nicolas Bourbaki, taken by Weil from an obscure general of the Franco-German War. Bourbaki became a self-selecting group of young mathematicians who were strong on algebra, and the individual Bourbaki members were interested in the Weil conjectures. In the end they succeeded completely. A new kind of algebraic topology was developed, and the Weil conjectures were proved. The generalized Riemann hypothesis was the last to surrender, being established by the Belgian Pierre Deligne in the early 1970s. Strangely, its resolution still leaves the original Riemann hypothesis unsolved.

Bourbaki was a key figure in the rethinking of structural mathematics. Algebraic topology was axiomatized by Samuel Eilenberg, a Polish-born American mathematician and Bourbaki member, and the American mathematician Norman Steenrod. Saunders Mac Lane, also of the United States, and Eilenberg extended this axiomatic approach until many types of mathematical structures were presented in families, called categories. Hence there was a category consisting of all groups and all maps between them that preserve multiplication, and there was another category of all topological spaces and all continuous maps between them. To do algebraic topology was to transfer a problem posed in one category (that of topological spaces) to another (usually that of commutative groups or rings). When he created the right algebraic topology for the Weil conjectures, the German-born French mathematician Alexandre Grothendieck, a Bourbaki of enormous energy, produced a new description of algebraic geometry. In his hands it became infused with the language of category theory. The route to algebraic geometry became the steepest ever, but the views from the summit have a naturalness and a profundity that have brought many experts to prefer it to the earlier formulations, including Weil’s.

Grothendieck’s formulation makes algebraic geometry the study of equations defined over rings rather than fields. Accordingly, it raises the possibility that questions about the integers can be answered directly. Building on the work of like-minded mathematicians in the United States, France, and Russia, the German Gerd Faltings triumphantly vindicated this approach when he solved the Englishman Louis Mordell’s conjecture in 1983. This conjecture states that almost all polynomial equations that define curves have at most finitely many rational solutions; the cases excluded from the conjecture are the simple ones that are much better understood.

Meanwhile, Gerhard Frey of Germany had pointed out that, if Fermat’s last theorem is false, so that there are integers u, v, w such that u^p + v^p = w^p (p greater than 5), then for these values of u, v, and p the curve y² = x(x − u^p)(x + v^p) has properties that contradict major conjectures of the Japanese mathematicians Taniyama Yutaka and Shimura Goro about elliptic curves. Frey’s observation, refined by Jean-Pierre Serre of France and proved by the American Ken Ribet, meant that by 1990 Taniyama’s unproven conjectures were known to imply Fermat’s last theorem.

In 1993 the English mathematician Andrew Wiles established the Shimura-Taniyama conjectures in a large range of cases that included Frey’s curve and therefore Fermat’s last theorem—a major feat even without the connection to Fermat. It soon became clear that the argument had a serious flaw; but in May 1995 Wiles, assisted by another English mathematician, Richard Taylor, published a different and valid approach. In so doing, Wiles not only solved the most famous outstanding conjecture in mathematics but also triumphantly vindicated the sophisticated and difficult methods of modern number theory.