Andrew Wiles

Andrew Wiles is still a living legend who made great contributions to the Mathematical Society. The British Mathematician Andrew John Wiles, was born on 11 April 1953 in Cambridge. Wiles is known to be quite an intelligent mathematician, due to the fact that he uncovered Fermat’s Last Theorem when he was only 10 years old. Wiles was educated at Merton College, Oxford where he gained his Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics in 1974. He also carried out a research at Clare College, Cambridge and finally got his PhD in 1980. He stayed at The Institute for Advanced Studies at New Jersey in 1981 and later on became a Professor at Princeton University.

Wiles worked on a number of outstanding problems in number theory: the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjectures, the principal conjecture of Iwasawa theory and the Shimura-Taniyama-Weil conjecture. But one of his greatest achievements includes his successful attempt to prove Fermat’s Last Theorem. This proof resulted in him becoming quite popular and to suggest this he is a foreign member of the United States National Academy of Science, hence the man became an international mathematical legend. In recognition, he was awarded a special silver plaque - he was beyond the traditional age limit of 40 years for receiving the gold Fields Medal - by the International Mathematical Union in 1998. Many mathematicians had tried to solve it over the intervening centuries, but with no success. Wiles had been fascinated by the problem from the age of 10, when he first saw the conjecture. He spent 7 years of his life in isolation just to formulate his proof. It was later found out that there was an error in his proof. He isolated himself once again and reformulated the solution. Then, his proof was accepted.

His paper Modular Elliptic Curves and Fermat’s Last Theorem was published in the Annals of Mathematics.

He is at present a Royal Society Research Professor at Oxford University.

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