Andrew Wiles

From 1952 to 1955, his father worked as the chaplain at Ridley Hall, Cambridge, and later became the Regius Professor of Divinity at the University of Oxford.

Wiles began his formal schooling in Nigeria, while living there as a very young boy with his parents.

However, according to letters written by his parents, for at least the first several months after he was supposed to be attending classes, he refused to go.

From that fact, Wiles himself concluded that in his earliest years, he was not enthusiastic about spending time in academic institutions.

He trusts the letters, though he could not remember a time when he did not enjoy solving mathematical problems.

Wiles attended King's College School, Cambridge, and The Leys School, Cambridge.

Wiles states that he came across Fermat's Last Theorem on his way home from school when he was 10 years old.

He stopped at his local library where he found a book The Last Problem, by Eric Temple Bell, about the theorem.

Fascinated by the existence of a theorem that was so easy to state that he, a ten-year-old, could understand it, but that no one had proven, he decided to be the first person to prove it.

Sir Andrew John Wiles (born 11 April 1953) is an English mathematician and a Royal Society Research Professor at the University of Oxford, specialising in number theory.

Wiles was born on 11 April 1953 in Cambridge, England, the son of Maurice Frank Wiles (1923–2005) and Patricia Wiles (née Mowll).

After moving to Oxford and graduating from there in 1974, he worked on unifying Galois representations, elliptic curves and modular forms, starting with Barry Mazur’s generalizations of Iwasawa theory.

In 1974, Wiles earned his bachelor's degree in mathematics at Merton College, Oxford.

Wiles's graduate research was guided by John Coates, beginning in the summer of 1975.

Together they worked on the arithmetic of elliptic curves with complex multiplication by the methods of Iwasawa theory.

He further worked with Barry Mazur on the main conjecture of Iwasawa theory over the rational numbers, and soon afterward, he generalised this result to totally real fields.

In the early 1980s, Wiles moved to Princeton University from Cambridge and worked on expanding out and applying Hilbert modular forms.

In 1980, Wiles earned a PhD while at Clare College, Cambridge.

After a stay at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1981, Wiles became a Professor of Mathematics at Princeton University.

In 1985–86, Wiles was a Guggenheim Fellow at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques near Paris and at the École Normale Supérieure.

In 1986, upon reading Ken Ribet’s seminal work on Fermat’s Last Theorem, Wiles set out to prove the modularity theorem for semistable elliptic curves, which implied Fermat’s Last Theorem.

However, he soon realised that his knowledge was too limited, so he abandoned his childhood dream until it was brought back to his attention at the age of 33 by Ken Ribet's 1986 proof of the epsilon conjecture, which Gerhard Frey had previously linked to Fermat's famous equation.

Starting in mid-1986, based on successive progress of the previous few years of Gerhard Frey, Jean-Pierre Serre and Ken Ribet, it became clear that Fermat's Last Theorem (the statement that no three positive integers

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In 1987, Wiles was elected to the Royal Society.

At that point according to his election certificate, he had been working "on the construction of ℓ-adic representations attached to Hilbert modular forms, and has applied these to prove the 'main conjecture' for cyclotomic extensions of totally real fields".

From 1988 to 1990, Wiles was a Royal Society Research Professor at the University of Oxford, and then he returned to Princeton.

By 1993, he had been able to prove Fermat’s Last Theorem, though a flaw was discovered.

After an insight on 19 September 1994, Wiles and his student Richard Taylor were able to circumvent the flaw, and published the results in 1995, to widespread acclaim.

In proving Fermat’s Last Theorem, Wiles developed new tools for mathematicians to begin unifying disparate ideas and theorems.

From 1994 to 2009, Wiles was a Eugene Higgins Professor at Princeton.

Wiles is also a 1997 MacArthur Fellow.

Wiles was born in Cambridge to theologian Maurice Frank Wiles and his wife Patricia.

While spending much of his childhood in Nigeria, Wiles developed an interest in mathematics and in Fermat’s Last Theorem in particular.

His former student Taylor along with three other mathematicians were able to prove the full modularity theorem by 2000, using Wiles’ work.

He rejoined Oxford in 2011 as Royal Society Research Professor.

He is best known for proving Fermat's Last Theorem, for which he was awarded the 2016 Abel Prize and the 2017 Copley Medal and for which he was appointed a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2000.

Upon receiving the Abel Prize in 2016, Wiles reflected on his legacy, expressing his belief that he did not just prove Fermat’s Last Theorem, but pushed the whole of mathematics as a field towards the Langlands program of unifying number theory.

In 2018, Wiles was appointed the first Regius Professor of Mathematics at Oxford.

In May 2018, Wiles was appointed Regius Professor of Mathematics at Oxford, the first in the university's history.