Andrew Wiles
KBE FRS | |
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Born | Andrew John Wiles 11 April 1953 Cambridge, England |
Nationality | British |
Education | King's College School, Cambridge The Leys School |
Alma mater |
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Known for | Proving the Taniyama–Shimura conjecture for semistable elliptic curves, thereby proving Fermat's Last Theorem Proving the main conjecture of Iwasawa theory |
Awards |
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Scientific career | |
Fields | Mathematics |
Institutions | |
Doctoral students |
Sir Andrew John Wiles
Wiles was born in Cambridge to theologian
In proving Fermat’s Last Theorem, Wiles developed new tools for mathematicians to begin unifying disparate ideas and theorems. His former student Taylor along with three other mathematicians were able to prove the full modularity theorem by 2000, using Wiles’ work. 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.[5]
Education and early life
Wiles was born on 11 April 1953 in
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.[7]
Wiles attended
Career and research
In 1974, Wiles earned his
In 1980, Wiles earned a PhD while at Clare College, Cambridge.[3] After a stay at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1981, Wiles became a Professor of Mathematics at Princeton University.[14]
In 1985–86, Wiles was a
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".[12]
From 1988 to 1990, Wiles was a Royal Society Research Professor at the University of Oxford, and then he returned to Princeton. From 1994 to 2009, Wiles was a Eugene Higgins Professor at Princeton. He rejoined Oxford in 2011 as Royal Society Research Professor.[14]
In May 2018, Wiles was appointed Regius Professor of Mathematics at Oxford, the first in the university's history.[4]
Proof of Fermat's Last Theorem
Starting in mid-1986, based on successive progress of the previous few years of
The conjecture was seen by contemporary mathematicians as important, but extraordinarily difficult or perhaps impossible to prove.[18]: 203–205, 223, 226 For example, Wiles's ex-supervisor John Coates stated that it seemed "impossible to actually prove",[18]: 226 and Ken Ribet considered himself "one of the vast majority of people who believed [it] was completely inaccessible", adding that "Andrew Wiles was probably one of the few people on earth who had the audacity to dream that you can actually go and prove [it]."[18]: 223
Despite this, Wiles, with his from-childhood fascination with Fermat's Last Theorem, decided to undertake the challenge of proving the conjecture, at least to the extent needed for
Wiles’ research involved creating a proof by contradiction of Fermat’s Last Theorem, which Ribet in his
In June 1993, he presented his proof to the public for the first time at a conference in Cambridge. Gina Kolata of The New York Times summed up the presentation as follows:
He gave a lecture a day on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday with the title "Modular Forms, Elliptic Curves and Galois Representations". There was no hint in the title that Fermat's last theorem would be discussed, Dr. Ribet said. ... Finally, at the end of his third lecture, Dr. Wiles concluded that he had proved a general case of the Taniyama conjecture. Then, seemingly as an afterthought, he noted that that meant that Fermat's last theorem was true. Q.E.D.[17]
In August 1993, it was discovered that the proof contained a flaw in several areas, related to properties of the
Legacy
Wiles’ work has been used in many fields of mathematics. Notably, in 1999, his former student Richard Taylor and three other mathematicians built upon Wiles’ proof to prove the full modularity theorem.[26]
In 2016, upon receiving the Abel Prize, Wiles said about his proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem, “The methods that solved it opened up a new way of attacking one of the big webs of conjectures of contemporary mathematics called the Langlands Program, which as a grand vision tries to unify different branches of mathematics. It’s given us a new way to look at that.”[5]
Awards and honours
Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem has stood up to the scrutiny of the world's other mathematical experts. Wiles was interviewed for an episode of the
Wiles has been awarded a number of major prizes in mathematics and science:
- Junior Whitehead Prize of the London Mathematical Society (1988)[6]
- Elected a
- Elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1994)[29]
- Schock Prize (1995)[14]
- Fermat Prize (1995)[30]
- Wolf Prize in Mathematics (1995/6)[14]
- Elected a Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Sciences (1996)[13]
- NAS Award in Mathematics from the National Academy of Sciences (1996)[31]
- Royal Medal (1996)[30]
- Ostrowski Prize (1996)[32]
- Cole Prize (1997)[33]
- MacArthur Fellowship (1997)
- Wolfskehl Prize (1997)[34] – see Paul Wolfskehl
- Elected member of the American Philosophical Society (1997)[35]
- A silver plaque from the International Mathematical Union (1998) recognising his achievements, in place of the Fields Medal, which is restricted to those under 40 (Wiles was 41 when he proved the theorem in 1994)[36]
- King Faisal Prize (1998)[37]
- Clay Research Award (1999)[14]
- Premio Pitagora (Croton, 2004)[38]
- Shaw Prize (2005)[30]
- The asteroid 9999 Wiles was named after Wiles in 1999.[39]
- Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (2000)[40]
- The building at the University of Oxford housing the Mathematical Institute is named after Wiles.[41]
- Abel Prize (2016)[42][43][44][45][46]
- Copley Medal (2017)[1]
References
- ^ a b c "Mathematician Sir Andrew Wiles FRS wins the Royal Society's prestigious Copley Medal". The Royal Society. Retrieved 27 May 2017.
- ^ a b Andrew Wiles at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
- ^ EThOS uk.bl.ethos.477263.
- ^ a b "Sir Andrew Wiles appointed first Regius Professor of Mathematics at Oxford". News & Events. University of Oxford. 31 May 2018. Retrieved 1 June 2018.
- ^ a b Sample, Ian (15 March 2016). "Abel prize won by Oxford professor for Fermat's Last Theorem proof". the Guardian. Retrieved 20 November 2023.
- ^ doi:10.1093/ww/9780199540884.013.39819. (Subscription or UK public library membershiprequired.)
- ^ "Interview with Andrew Wiles". YouTube. The Abel Prize. 10 March 2023. Retrieved 15 November 2023.
- ^ "Alumni". King's College School, Cambridge. Retrieved 1 February 2022.
- ^ "Old Leysian Prof Sir Andrew Wiles wins the Copley Medal". The Leys & St Faith's Schools Foundation. 2 November 2017. Retrieved 1 February 2022.
- ^ a b "Andrew Wiles on Solving Fermat". WGBH. November 2000. Retrieved 16 March 2016.
- ISBN 9789814282291.
- ^ The Royal Society. Archived from the originalon 13 July 2015. Retrieved 16 March 2016.
- ^ a b "Andrew Wiles". National Academy of Sciences. Retrieved 16 March 2016.
- ^ MacTutor History of Mathematics archive. Retrieved 1 February 2022.
- ^ Brown, Peter (28 May 2015). "How Math's Most Famous Proof Nearly Broke". Nautilus. Archived from the original on 15 March 2016. Retrieved 16 March 2016.
- ^ Broad, William J. (31 January 2022). "Profiles in Science - The Texas Oil Heir Who Took On Math's Impossible Dare - James M. Vaughn Jr., wielding a fortune, argues that he brought about the Fermat breakthrough after the best and brightest had failed for centuries to solve the puzzle". The New York Times. Retrieved 2 February 2022.
- ^ a b Kolata, Gina (24 June 1993). "At Last, Shout of 'Eureka!' In Age-Old Math Mystery". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 20 November 2023. Retrieved 21 January 2013.
- ^ ISBN 1-85702-521-0
- ^ Stevens, Glenn (n.d.), An Overview of the Proof of Fermat's Last Theorem (PDF), Boston University
- ^ Boston, Nick (Spring 2003), Proof of Fermat's Last Theorem (PDF), University of Wisconsin–Madison
- ^ a b "Fermat's Last Theorem / Useful Notes". TV Tropes. 2023. Retrieved 20 November 2023.
- ^ a b Weisstein, Eric W. (14 May 2004). "Fermat's Last Theorem -- from Wolfram MathWorld". Wolfram Research, Inc. Retrieved 20 November 2023.
- ^ Weisstein, Eric W. (26 September 2009). "Taniyama-Shimura Conjecture -- from Wolfram MathWorld". Wolfram Research, Inc. Retrieved 20 November 2023.
- JSTOR i310703.
- ^ "Are mathematicians finally satisfied with Andrew Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem? Why has this theorem been so difficult to prove?". Scientific American. 21 October 1999. Retrieved 16 March 2016.
- ^ Devlin, Keith (21 July 1999). "Beyond Fermat's last theorem". the Guardian. Retrieved 20 November 2023.
- ^ "BBC TWO, Horizon Fermat's Last Theorem". BBC. 16 December 2010. Retrieved 12 June 2014.
- ^ "Sir Andrew Wiles KBE FRS". London: Royal Society. Archived from the original on 17 November 2015. Retrieved 1 February 2022.
One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from the royalsociety.org website where: All text published under the heading 'Biography' on Fellow profile pages is available under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
- ^ "Andrew J. Wiles". American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Retrieved 10 December 2021.
- ^ a b c Wiles Receives 2005 Shaw Prize. American Mathematical Society. Retrieved 16 March 2016.
- ^ "NAS Award in Mathematics". National Academy of Sciences. Archived from the original on 29 December 2010. Retrieved 13 February 2011.
- ^ Wiles Receives Ostrowski Prize. American Mathematical Society. Retrieved 16 March 2016.
- ^ "1997 Cole Prize, Notices of the AMS" (PDF). American Mathematical Society. Archived (PDF) from the original on 9 October 2022. Retrieved 13 April 2008.
- ^ Paul Wolfskehl and the Wolfskehl Prize. American Mathematical Society. Retrieved 16 March 2016.
- ^ "APS Member History". search.amphilsoc.org. Retrieved 10 December 2021.
- ^ "Andrew J. Wiles Awarded the "IMU Silver Plaque"". American Mathematical Society. 11 April 1953. Retrieved 12 June 2014.
- ^ "Andrew Wiles Receives Faisal Prize" (PDF). American Mathematical Society. Archived (PDF) from the original on 9 October 2022. Retrieved 12 June 2014.
- ^ "Premio Pitagora" (in Italian). University of Calabria. Archived from the original on 15 January 2014. Retrieved 16 March 2016.
- ^ "JPL Small-Body Database Browser". NASA. Retrieved 11 May 2009.
- ^ "No. 55710". The London Gazette (Supplement). 31 December 1999. p. 34.
- ^ "Mathematical Institute". University of Oxford. Archived from the original on 13 January 2016. Retrieved 16 March 2016.
- PMID 26983518.
- ^ "British mathematician Sir Andrew Wiles gets Abel math prize". The Washington Post. Associated Press. 15 March 2016. Archived from the original on 15 March 2016.
- ^ McKenzie, Sheena (16 March 2016). "300-year-old math question solved, professor wins $700k – CNN". CNN.
- ^ "A British mathematician just won a $700,000 prize for solving this fascinating centuries-old math problem 22 years ago". Business Insider. Retrieved 19 March 2016.
- ^ Iyengar, Rishi. "Andrew Wiles Wins 2016 Abel Prize for Fermat's Last Theorem". Time. Retrieved 19 March 2016.
External links
- Profile from Oxford
- Profile from Princeton Archived 5 November 2021 at the Wayback Machine