At the French Academy of Sciences, heated sessions were held: first Gabriel Lamé said he had almost completed the proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem, then Augustin Louis Cauchy said he had also done it independently, and finally Joseph Liouville, on behalf of the German mathematician Ernst Kummer, announced that the latter had demonstrated that the unique factorization, used by both Lamé and Cauchy, was not necessarily true for every number (in particular, it was not true for imaginary numbers), thus killing any attempt at proof using the techniques of the time.
