Mathematician Kevin Buzzard of Imperial College London is training computers how to prove one of the most famous problems in math history: Fermat’s last theorem. Resolving the problem isn’t the point.

On June 23, 1993, the mathematician Andrew Wiles gave the last of three lectures detailing his solution to Fermat's last theorem, a problem that had remained unsolved for three and a half centuries.

For centuries, Fermat's Last Theorem was the Everest of mathematics. Now, three decades after it was finally solved, mathematicians are asking artificial intelligence to prove it all over again. That ...