Andrew Wiles

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Andrew Wiles (2005)

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 , from which the Great Fermatsche Theorem results.

Life

Wiles studied at the Universities of Oxford (Bachelor's degree in 1974) and Cambridge ( Clare College ), where he began research work with and with John Coates in 1975 (doctorate in 1980 with Reciprocity laws and the conjecture of Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer , “Reciprocity laws and the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture "). From 1977 to 1980 he was a Junior Research Fellow at Clare College, Cambridge and at the same time Assistant Professor at Harvard . After stays in Bonn and at the Institute for Advanced Study (1981), he became professor at Princeton University in 1982 . In 1985/1986 he was a Guggenheim Fellow at IHES near Paris and at the École Normale Supérieure . From 1988 to 1990 he was Royal Society Research Professor at Oxford. From 1994 to 2009 he was Eugene Higgins Professor at Princeton and returned to the University of Oxford in 2011.

On May 31, 2018, the University of Oxford announced that the Regius Professorship for Mathematics , founded in 2016 by Queen Elizabeth II on the occasion of her 90th birthday, would be filled with Professor Wiles. Wiles' father, Maurice Frank Wiles , was Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford University from 1970 to 1991 .

Works

With Barry Mazur in 1984 he proved the main conjecture of the Iwasawa theory about rational numbers, which he then extended to totally real bodies.

He is best 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 resulted; this also brought him great attention outside of the mathematical world. The connection between the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture and Fermat's proof was previously conjectured by Gerhard Frey in the mid-1980s and confirmed by proofs of auxiliary sentences by Ken Ribet and Jean-Pierre Serre . Wiles worked secretly on his proof for over seven years, during which time he partially withdrew from the “mathematical public”. His first published evidence (i.e. evidence circulating among experts for the purpose of checking evidence), which he presented in a lecture at the Isaac Newton Institute in Cambridge in June 1993, turned out to be incomplete, but he and his student Richard Taylor were able to trace the evidence along one of them lead another path previously tried by him. In 1998 Taylor, Christophe Breuil, Fred Diamond and Brian Conrad were finally able to prove the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture not only for special, but for all elliptical curves.

Awards

Andrew Wiles in front of the statue of Pierre de Fermat in Beaumont-de-Lomagne (October 1995)

In 1988 Wiles received the LMS Junior Whitehead Prize . This was followed by numerous awards in recognition of his proof of the Fermat conjecture. At the International Mathematicians' Congress in Berlin in 1998, he was awarded a special award (the silver medal) by the International Mathematical Union (IMU), because at the time of its publication Wiles had already exceeded the traditional age limit of 40 for the award of the prestigious Fields Medal . In 1994 he gave one of the plenary lectures at the ICM in Zurich on his proof (Modular Forms, Elliptic Curves and Fermat's Last Theorem) . In 1995 he received 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 a MacArthur Fellow . In 1997 he received the Wolfskehl Prize donated in 1908 for the solution of the Fermat conjecture . In 1998 he received the König Faisal Prize , the Clay Research Award in 1999 and the Shaw Prize in 2005 .

In 1989 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society , in 1994 of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , in 1996 a foreign member of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA and in 1997 a member of the American Philosophical Society . In 1999 an asteroid was named after him: (9999) Wiles . In 2000 he was appointed Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE) and thus knighted. The Czech Republic honored Wiles' achievement with a stamp issue in 2000. In 2015 Wiles was elected to the Academia Europaea . In March 2016 he was awarded the Abel Prize , one of the highest honors for mathematicians, for proving Fermat's conjecture . In 2017 he was awarded the Copley Medal and in 2019 the De Morgan Medal .

student

His PhD students include Richard Taylor , Brian Conrad , Karl Rubin , Fred Diamond , Ehud de Shalit , Christopher Skinner and Manjul Bhargava .

Fonts

literature

Web links

Commons : Andrew Wiles  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. a b Oxford University press release: Sir Andrew Wiles appointed first Regius Professor of Mathematics at Oxford. Oxford mathematician Sir Andrew Wiles, renowned for his proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, has been appointed by Her Majesty the Queen to be Oxford's first Regius Professor of Mathematics. In: Oxford University website. May 31, 2018, accessed August 26, 2018 .
  2. ^ Who's Who , A&C Black, January 2007
  3. ^ Member History: Andrew J. Wiles. American Philosophical Society, accessed July 21, 2018 .
  4. ^ Postage stamp for Andrew Wiles' proof of Fermat's theorem