21 Facts About Andrew Wiles

1.

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

2.

Andrew Wiles is best known for proving Fermat's Last Theorem, for which he was awarded the 2016 Abel Prize and the 2017 Copley Medal by the Royal Society.

3.

Andrew Wiles was appointed Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2000, and in 2018, was appointed the first Regius Professor of Mathematics at Oxford.

4.

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

5.

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

6.

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

7.

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

8.

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

9.

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

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

13.

Andrew Wiles rejoined Oxford in 2011 as Royal Society Research Professor.

14.

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

15.

Andrew Wiles dedicated all of his research time to this problem for over six years in near-total secrecy, covering up his efforts by releasing prior work in small segments as separate papers and confiding only in his wife.

16.

Andrew Wiles gave a lecture a day on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday with the title "Modular Forms, Elliptic Curves and Galois Representations".

17.

Finally, at the end of his third lecture, Dr Andrew Wiles concluded that he had proved a general case of the Taniyama conjecture.

18.

Andrew Wiles tried and failed for over a year to repair his proof.

19.

Andrew Wiles was interviewed for an episode of the BBC documentary series Horizon about Fermat's Last Theorem.

20.

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

21.

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.