History

An important period for the journal was 1928–1958 with Solomon Lefschetz as editor. During this time, Annals became an increasingly well-known and respected journal. The rise of Annals, in turn, stimulated American mathematics. Norman Steenrod characterized Lefschetz' impact as the Annals editor as follows:"The importance to American mathematicians of a first-class journal is that it sets high standards for them to aim at. In this somewhat indirect manner, Lefschetz profoundly affected the development of mathematics in the United States."

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Category:Mathematics journals Category:Publications established in 1874 Category:Open access journals Category:English-language journals Category:Bimonthly journals

Early life and education

Wiles discovered 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. Puzzled by the fact that the statement of the theorem was so easy that he, a ten-year old, could understand it, he decided to be the first person to prove it. However, he soon realized that his knowledge of mathematics was too small, he abandoned his childhood dream, until 1986, when he heard that Ribet had proved Serre's ε-conjecture and therefore established a link between Fermat's Last Theorem and the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture.

Wiles earned his bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1974 after his study at Merton College, Oxford, and a Ph.D. in 1980, after his research at Clare College, Cambridge.

After a stay at the Institute for Advanced Study in New Jersey in 1981, Wiles became a professor at Princeton University. In 1985-86, Wiles was a Guggenheim Fellow at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques near Paris and at the École Normale Supérieure. From 1988 to 1990, Wiles was a Royal Society Research Professor at Oxford University, and then he returned to Princeton.

In October 2009 it was announced that Wiles would again become a Royal Society Research Professor at Oxford in 2011.

Mathematical career

The proof of Fermat's Last Theorem

Starting in the summer of 1986, based on successive progress of the previous few years of Gerhard Frey, Jean-Pierre Serre and Ken Ribet, Wiles realised that a proof of a limited form of the modularity theorem might then be in reach. He dedicated all of his research time to this problem in relative secrecy. In 1993, he presented his proof to the public for the first time at a conference in Cambridge. In August 1993, however, it turned out that the proof contained a gap. In desperation, Andrew Wiles tried to fill in this gap, but found out that the error he had made was a very fundamental one. According to Wiles, the crucial idea for circumventing, rather than closing this gap, came to him on 19 September 1994. Together with his former student Richard Taylor, he published a second paper which circumvented the gap and thus completed the proof. Both papers were published in 1995 in a special volume of the Annals of Mathematics.

Recognition by the media

Public Honours

Notes

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Category:1953 births Category:Living people Category:20th-century mathematicians Category:21st-century mathematicians Category:Alumni of Clare College, Cambridge Category:Alumni of Merton College, Oxford Category:English mathematicians Category:Fellows of the Royal Society Category:Honorary Fellows of Merton College, Oxford Category:MacArthur Fellows Category:Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences Category:Old Leysians Category:Number theorists Category:Princeton University faculty Category:Rolf Schock Prize laureates Category:Wolf Prize in Mathematics laureates Category:Members of the French Academy of Sciences Category:Knights Commander of the Order of the British Empire Category:Royal Medal winners Category:Whitehead Prize winners