Andrew Wiles

Andrew Wiles was born in Cambridge, England, and became fascinated with Fermat's Last Theorem — that no positive integers satisfy $x^n+y^n=z^n$ for $n>2$ — after finding a book on it in a library at age ten. He earned a PhD at Clare College, Cambridge, in 1980 under John Coates, working on elliptic curves, then moved to Princeton University in 1982.

Working largely alone for seven years, Wiles pursued a strategy connecting Fermat's Last Theorem to the Taniyama–Shimura–Weil modularity conjecture, which linked elliptic curves to modular forms. He announced a proof in 1993, but referees found a gap in one key argument (an Euler system bound). Together with his former student Richard Taylor, Wiles repaired the gap using a new approach via Iwasawa theory and Hecke algebras, publishing the complete proof — covering the semistable case, which suffices for Fermat's Last Theorem — in the Annals of Mathematics in 1995.

Because he was over 40, Wiles was ineligible for the Fields Medal but received a special silver plaque from the International Mathematical Union in 1998. He later received the Wolf Prize (1995/96), the Shaw Prize (2005), and the Abel Prize (2016) "for his stunning proof of Fermat's Last Theorem by way of the modularity conjecture for semistable elliptic curves, opening a new era in number theory." Knighted in 2000, Wiles returned to the University of Oxford in 2011 as Royal Society Research Professor.

Workplaces: Princeton University, University of Oxford

United Kingdom

Contributions, linked to the library