Andrew Wiles
Sir Andrew John Wiles KBE FRS ( born April 11, 1953 in Cambridge ) is a British mathematician. He became famous for his proof of the Taniyama - Shimura conjecture for semi- stable elliptic curves, resulting in the Great Fermat's theorem.
Life
Wiles studied at the universities of Oxford ( Bachelor, 1974) and Cambridge (Clare College), where he in 1975 with research on and started with John Coates (PhD, 1980, with: Reciprocity laws and the conjecture of Birch and Swinnerton - Dyer ). From 1977 to 1980 he was a Junior Research Fellow at Clare College, Cambridge and at the same time assistant professor at Harvard. After living in Bonn and at the Institute for Advanced Study (1981 ) In 1982 he became a professor at Princeton. 1985/1986 he was a Guggenheim Fellow at the IHES in Paris and at the Ecole Normale Supérieure. 1988 to 1990 he was a Royal Society Research Professor at Oxford. He is currently a professor at Princeton.
Work
With Barry Mazur 1984 he proved the main conjecture of Iwasawa theory over the rational numbers, which he subsequently extended to a total real body.
He is primarily known for his proof of the modularity of a large class of elliptic curves ( Taniyama - Shimura Conjecture ), from which the last missing step in the proof of Fermat's great theorem revealed; this brought him outside the mathematical experts attention. The relation of the Taniyama - Shimura conjecture to Fermat's proof was previously thought the mid-1980s by Gerhard Frey and been backed up by evidence of lemmas by Ken Ribet and Jean- Pierre Serre. At its proof Wiles worked in secret for seven years, during which he partially withdrew from the " mathematical public." His first published ( that is, to evidence validation with experts Coursing ) evidence he presented in lectures at the Isaac Newton Institute in Cambridge in June 1993, proved to be incomplete, but he could then, together with his student Richard Taylor the proof still along a other previously attempted by him lead the way. 1998 Taylor, Christophe Breuil, Brian Conrad, Fred Diamond, and could eventually prove not only special, but for all elliptic curves the Taniyama - Shimura conjecture.
Awards
In 1988, Wiles received the Junior Whitehead Prize of the LMS. This was followed in recognition of his proof of Fermatvermutung numerous awards. At the International Congress of Mathematicians in Berlin in 1998 him a special award was presented ( the silver medal ) of the International Mathematical Union (IMU ), depriving Wiles had already passed at the time of its publication, the traditional retirement age of 40 years for the award of the prestigious Fields Medal. In 1994, he gave one of the plenary on the ICM in Zurich on his proof (Modular Forms, Elliptic Curves and Fermat 's Last Theorem ). In 1995 he was awarded the Rolf Schock Prize and the Fermat Prize and in 1996 the Cole prize ( the highest award for Number Theory ), the Ostrowski Prize, the Wolf Prize, the NAS Award in Mathematics and the Royal Medal. In 1997 he was MacArthur Fellow. In 1997, he was able to receive the 1908 donated for the solution of Fermatvermutung Wolfskehl price. In 1998 he received the King Faisal Award and the 1999 Clay Research Award and the 2005 Shaw Prize.
He became a Fellow of the Royal Society and in 1996 foreign member of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA 1989. In 2000 he was appointed Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE ) and beaten so that a knight.
The Czech Republic paid tribute to Wiles ' performance with a stamp issue in 2000.
Student
His students include Richard Taylor, Brian Conrad, Karl Rubin, Fred Diamond, Ehud de Shalit, Christopher Skinner and Manjul Bhargava.
Writings
- Andrew Wiles: Modular elliptic curves and Fermat 's Last Theorem. (PDF) In: Annals of Mathematics (ed.) Annals of Mathematics. 141, No. 3, 1995, pp. 443-551. doi: 10.2307/2118559. (PDF file, 10.2 MB - alternatively, PDF file, 597 kB).