Andrew Wiles

Sir Andrew John Wiles (born 11 April 1953) is a British mathematician renowned for his proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, a problem that had eluded mathematicians for over 350 years since it was conjectured by Pierre de Fermat in 1637. His groundbreaking work, completed in 1994 after seven years of secretive research at Princeton University, established that there are no positive integers \(a\), \(b\), and \(c\) satisfying \(a^n + b^n = c^n\) for any integer \(n > 2\). Wiles's achievement revolutionized number theory by linking elliptic curves to modular forms, influencing fields from algebraic geometry to cryptography.

Born in Cambridge, England, Wiles showed an early fascination with mathematics, inspired at age 10 by a popular book on Fermat's Last Theorem that sparked his lifelong pursuit. He completed his undergraduate studies at Merton College, Oxford, earning a B.A. in 1974, before pursuing graduate work at Clare College, Cambridge, where he received his Ph.D. in 1980 under supervisor John Coates. His doctoral thesis, titled "Reciprocity Laws and the Conjecture of Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer," addressed p-adic properties of elliptic curves and contributed to the Iwasawa theory, earning him early recognition in diophantine analysis.