Andrew Wiles
Life
The mathematician who proved Fermat's Last Theorem in 1995, ending a 358-year siege through modular forms and elliptic curves.
Decisive moments
Around age 10 — meeting Fermat's Last Theorem
A local-library history book introduced a problem a child could understand but generations had failed to prove, and he began trying it himself.
Ribet's link sparks the secret project
PrincetonRibet proved that Taniyama–Shimura ⟹ Fermat. Wiles began secret work on Taniyama–Shimura for the next seven years.
June 23 — the Cambridge lecture
At the final Isaac Newton Institute lecture he announced a modularity result implying Fermat's Last Theorem. A gap emerged during scrutiny of the manuscript.
September — a new route around the gap
A new connection between two approaches repaired the argument with Richard Taylor. Wiles's main paper and the Taylor–Wiles companion appeared together in the 1995 Annals of Mathematics.
If this person hadn't existed
This is a thought experiment about influence, not a verified historical fact.
The proof did more than close one problem. Its methods linking elliptic curves, modular forms, and Galois representations accelerated the full modularity theorem and later work around the Langlands program.
Influence network
Beyond MathVoyage
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