One of the most difficult problems in mathematics has finally been solved.

It is called the Shimura-Taniyama-Weil (STW) conjecture, and it has baffled and defeated some of the greatest minds in maths over the last 40 years.

Now an international team is claiming victory.

"This is one of the crowning achievements of mathematics in the 20th Century," said number theorist Professor Henri Darmon of McGill University in Canada.

The STW conjecture links two seemingly unrelated areas of mathematics: the theory of numbers and the theory of shapes or, as mathematicians prefer to call them, elliptic curves and modular forms.

For decades, mathematicians have studied these subjects realising that there are deep connections between them but without ever being able to pin down the exact relationship