Andrew John Wiles

Sir Andrew Wiles
Wiles at the 51st birthday conference for P. Deligne (Institute for Advanced Study, 2005)
Born	Andrew John Wiles (1953-04-11) 11 April 1953 (age 64) Cambridge, England
Nationality	British
Fields	Mathematics
Institutions	University of Oxford Princeton University
Alma mater	Merton College, Oxford Clare College, Cambridge
Thesis	Reciprocity Laws and the Conjecture of Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer (1979)
Doctoral advisor	John Coates
Doctoral students	Manjul Bhargava Brian Conrad Fred Diamond Karl Rubin Christopher Skinner Richard Taylor Ritabrata Munshi
Known for	Proving the Taniyama–Shimura Conjecture for semistable elliptic curves, thereby proving Fermat's Last Theorem Proving the main conjecture of Iwasawa theory
Notable awards	Whitehead Prize (1988) FRS (1989) Rolf Schock Prize (1995) Ostrowski Prize (1995) Fermat Prize (1995) Wolf Prize (1995/6) Royal Medal (1996) NAS Award in Mathematics (1996) Cole Prize (1997) Wolfskehl Prize (1997) IMU Silver Plaque (1998) King Faisal International Prize in Science (1998) Shaw Prize (2005) Abel Prize (2016) Copley Medal (2017)

Sir Andrew John Wiles KBE FRS (born 11 April 1953) is a British 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 received the 2016 Abel Prize. Wiles has received numerous other honours, including the Copley Medal, the Royal Society's highest honour, in 2017.

Wiles was born in 1953 in Cambridge, England, the son of Maurice Frank Wiles (1923–2005), the Regius Professor of Divinity at the University of Oxford, and Patricia Wiles (née Mowll). His father worked as the Chaplain at Ridley Hall, Cambridge, for the years 1952–55. Wiles attended King's College School, Cambridge, and The Leys School, Cambridge.

Wiles states that he came across Fermat's Last Theorem on his way home from school when he was 10 years old. He stopped by his local library where he found a book about the theorem. Fascinated by the existence of a theorem that was so easy to state that he, a ten-year-old, could understand it, but that no one had proven, he decided to be the first person to prove it. However, he soon realised that his knowledge was too limited, so he abandoned his childhood dream, until it was brought back to his attention at the age of 33 by Ken Ribet's 1986 proof of the epsilon conjecture, which Gerhard Frey had previously linked to Fermat's famous equation.