Andrew Wiles

Andrew Wiles is a British mathematician who proved Fermat's Last Theorem, the claim Pierre de Fermat had written in a book margin in the seventeenth century that no three positive integers can satisfy the equation a to the n power plus b to the n power equals c to the n power for any integer n greater than two, and which had remained unproved for more than 350 years. Wiles worked largely in secret for about seven years while a professor at Princeton University, and his proof proceeded by establishing a special case of the modularity theorem connecting elliptic curves and modular forms, which was already known to imply Fermat's Last Theorem. His first announcement of the proof in 1993 was found to contain a gap, which Wiles, working with his former student Richard Taylor, closed over the following year, and the corrected proof was published in 1995. Wiles received numerous honors for the achievement, including a special silver plaque from the International Mathematical Union in 1998, since he was past the traditional age limit for the Fields Medal, and the Abel Prize in 2016.