Andrew Wiles

Wiles was born on 11 April 1953[8] in Cambridge, England, the son of Maurice Frank Wiles (1923–2005) and Patricia Wiles (née Mowll). 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.[1]

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 he was not in his earliest years enthusiastic about spending time in academic institutions. He trusts the letters, though he could not remember himself a time when he did not enjoy solving mathematical problems.[9]

Wiles attended King's College School, Cambridge,[10] and The Leys School, Cambridge.[11] 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.[12] 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. 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.[13]

In 1974, Wiles earned his bachelor's degree in mathematics at Merton College, Oxford.[1] 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.[14]

In 1980, Wiles earned a PhD while at Clare College, Cambridge.[5] After a stay at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1981, Wiles became a Professor of Mathematics at Princeton University.[15]

In 1985–86, Wiles was a Guggenheim Fellow at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques near Paris and at the École Normale Supérieure. 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.[15]

In May 2018, Wiles was appointed Regius Professor of Mathematics at Oxford, the first in the university's history.[7]

Andrew Wiles in front of the statue of Pierre de Fermat in Beaumont-de-Lomagne in 1995, Fermat's birthplace in southern France

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 BBC documentary series Horizon[22] about Fermat's Last Theorem. This was broadcast as an episode of the PBS science television series Nova with the title "The Proof".[12] His work and life are also described in great detail in Simon Singh's popular book Fermat's Last Theorem.

Wiles has been awarded a number of major prizes in mathematics and science:

• Junior Whitehead Prize of the London Mathematical Society (1988)[1]
• Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1989[23][24]
• Elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1994)[25]
• Schock Prize (1995)[15]
• Fermat Prize (1995)[26]
• Wolf Prize in Mathematics (1995/6)[15]
• Elected a Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Sciences (1996)[14]
• NAS Award in Mathematics from the National Academy of Sciences (1996)[27]
• Royal Medal (1996)[26]
• Ostrowski Prize (1996)[28]
• Cole Prize (1997)[29]
• MacArthur Fellowship (1997)
• Wolfskehl Prize (1997)[30] – see Paul Wolfskehl
• Elected member of the American Philosophical Society (1997)[31]
• 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)[32]
• King Faisal Prize (1998)[33]
• Clay Research Award (1999)[15]
• Premio Pitagora (Croton, 2004)[34]
• Shaw Prize (2005)[26]
• The asteroid 9999 Wiles was named after Wiles in 1999.[35]
• Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (2000)[36]
• The building at the University of Oxford housing the Mathematical Institute is named after Wiles.[37]
• Abel Prize (2016)[2][38][39][40][41]
• Copley Medal (2017)[3]

Wiles's 1987 certificate of election to the Royal Society reads:

Andrew Wiles is almost unique amongst number-theorists in his ability to bring to bear new tools and new ideas on some of the most intractable problems of number theory. His finest achievement to date has been his proof, in joint work with Mazur, of the "main conjecture" of Iwasawa theory for cyclotomic extensions of the rational field. This work settles many of the basic problems on cyclotomic fields which go back to Kummer, and is unquestionably one of the major advances in number theory in our times. Earlier he did deep work on the conjecture of Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer for elliptic curves with complex multiplication – one offshoot of this was his proof of an unexpected and beautiful generalization of the classical explicit reciprocity laws of Artin–Hasse–Iwasawa. Most recently, he has made new progress 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 – again a remarkable result since none of the classical tools of cyclotomic fields applied to these problems.[24]

• Profile from Oxford
• Profile from Princeton Archived 5 November 2021 at the Wayback Machine