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About the Andrew Wiles
Sir Andrew John Wiles is an English mathematician and a Royal Society Research Professor at the University of Oxford, specialising in number theory. He is best known for proving Fermat’s Last Theorem, for which he was awarded the 2016 Abel Prize and the 2017 Copley Medal and for which he was appointed a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2000. In 2018, Wiles was appointed the first Regius Professor of Mathematics at Oxford. Wiles is also a 1997 MacArthur Fellow.
Wiles was born in Cambridge to theologian Maurice Frank Wiles and Patricia Wiles. While spending much of his childhood in Nigeria, Wiles developed an interest in mathematics and in Fermat’s Last Theorem in particular. After moving to Oxford and graduating from there in 1974, he worked on unifying Galois representations, elliptic curves and modular forms, starting with Barry Mazur’s generalizations of Iwasawa theory. In the early 1980s, Wiles spent a few years at the University of Cambridge before moving to Princeton University, where he worked on expanding out and applying Hilbert modular forms. In 1986, upon reading Ken Ribet’s seminal work on Fermat’s Last Theorem, Wiles set out to prove the modularity theorem for semistable elliptic curves, which implied Fermat’s Last Theorem. By 1993, he had been able to prove Fermat’s Last Theorem, though a flaw was discovered. After an insight on 19 September 1994, Wiles and his student Richard Taylor were able to circumvent the flaw, and published the results in 1995, to widespread acclaim.
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.
Frequently Asked Questions
{mb_by_number_of_quotes} Quotes by Andrew Wiles
- 1.
Pure mathematicians just love to try unsolved problems – they love a challenge.
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- 2.
I know it’s a rare privilege, but if one can really tackle something in adult life that means that much to you, then it’s more rewarding than anything I can imagine.
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- 3.
I realized that anything to do with Fermat’s Last Theorem generates too much interest.
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- 4.
I hope that seeing the excitement of solving this problem will make young mathematicians realize that there are lots and lots of other problems in mathematics which are going to be just as challenging in the future.
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- 5.
There’s also a sense of freedom. I was so obsessed by this problem that I was thinking about if all the time – when I woke up in the morning, when I went to sleep at night, and that went on for eight years.
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- 6.
I’m sure that some of them will be very hard and I’ll have a sense of achievement again, but nothing will mean the same to me – there’s no other problem in mathematics that could hold me the way that this one did.
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- 7.
That particular odyssey is now over. My mind is now at rest.
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- 8.
I really believed that I was on the right track, but that did not mean that I would necessarily reach my goal.
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- 9.
The only way I could relax was when I was with my children.
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- 10.
I tried to fit it in with some previous broad conceptual understanding of some part of mathematics that would clarify the particular problem I was thinking about.
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- 11.
I grew up in Cambridge in England, and my love of mathematics dates from those early childhood days.
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- 12.
I had this rare privilege of being able to pursue in my adult life, what had been my childhood dream.
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- 13.
Mathematicians aren’t satisfied because they know there are no solutions up to four million or four billion, they really want to know that there are no solutions up to infinity.
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- 14.
Always try the problem that matters most to you.
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- 15.
We’ve lost something that’s been with us for so long, and something that drew a lot of us into mathematics. But perhaps that’s always the way with math problems, and we just have to find new ones to capture our attention.
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- 16.
It could be that the methods needed to take the next step may simply be beyond present day mathematics. Perhaps the methods I needed to complete the proof would not be invented for a hundred years.
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- 17.
Well, some mathematics problems look simple, and you try them for a year or so, and then you try them for a hundred years, and it turns out that they’re extremely hard to solve.
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- 18.
There are proofs that date back to the Greeks that are still valid today.
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- 19.
It’s fine to work on any problem, so long as it generates interesting mathematics along the way – even if you don’t solve it at the end of the day.
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- 20.
Fermat said he had a proof.
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- 21.
I was so obsessed by this problem that I was thinking about it all the time – when I woke up in the morning, when I went to sleep at night – and that went on for eight years.
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- 22.
Just because we can’t find a solution it doesn’t mean that there isn’t one.
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- 23.
But the best problem I ever found, I found in my local public library.
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- 24.
Then when I reached college I realized that many people had thought about the problem during the 18th and 19th centuries and so I studied those methods.
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- 25.
However impenetrable it seems, if you don’t try it, then you can never do it.
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- 26.
Perhaps the methods I needed to complete the proof would not be invented for a hundred years. So even if I was on the right track, I could be living in the wrong century.
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- 27.
The greatest problem for mathematicians now is probably the Riemann Hypothesis.
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- 28.
I loved doing problems in school.
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- 29.
The definition of a good mathematical problem is the mathematics it generates rather than the problem itself.
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- 30.
I don’t believe Fermat had a proof. I think he fooled himself into thinking he had a proof.
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