Andrew Wiles

Sir Andrew John Wiles KBE FRS (born April 11 1953) is a British mathematician and a professor at Princeton University, specialising in number theory. He is most famous for proving Fermat's Last Theorem. Andrew Wiles was born in Cambridge, England in 1953 and attended King's College School, Cambridge (where his maths teacher, David Higginbottom first introduced Fermat's Last Theorem to him) and The Leys School, Cambridge; and earned his BA degree in 1974 after study at Merton College, Oxford, and a Ph.D. in 1980 after research at Clare College, Cambridge. His graduate research was guided by John Coates beginning in the summer of 1975. Together they worked on the arithmetic of elliptic curve with complex multiplication by the methods of Iwasawa theory. He further worked with Barry Mazur on the main conjecture of Iwasawa theory over Q, and soon afterwards generalized this result to totally real field. Taking approximately seven years to complete the work, Wiles was the first person to... full article at wikipedia