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WHO WAS ANDREW WILES

Sir Andrew John Wiles is a world renowned mathematician. He was born on April 11, 1953 in Cambridge, England. Andrew was educated at  Merton College, Oxford.  He is a royal His father was a professor of divinity at the University of Oxford. As a young man, Andrew has always had an interest in mathematics. He would create math problems for himself, only to challenge himself to find an answer. He has received awards such as the Fermat Prize (1995),  Royal Medal (1996), and The Shaw Prize (2005). Andrew was the first mathematician who proved Fermat's last theorem. 

Education

As a child, Andrew would rent out books from the library to try and challenge himself by attempting to solve mathematics problems. One of the books that he rented talked about  Fermat’s Last Theorem. Andrew took this unsolved math problem and set his sights toward solving it, even though he was only 10 years old at the time. This problem lead Andrew to want to learn more about mathematics so it could help him solve it. Andrew attended Merton College in Oxford in 1971. This is where he earned his bachelor’s degree in mathematics. In 1981 he was offered a position to be professor at Princeton university, which he accepted. In 1988 Andrew was hired by Oxford University as a Royal Society Research Professor. When he was 33, he realized that he had enough knowledge to start solving Fermat’s Last Theorem

Career 

In 1985, Andrew became a Guggenheim Fellow at the Institut des Haute Études Scientifiques near Paris, and at the École Normale Supérieure. From 1988 to 1990, Andrew was a Royal Society Research Professor at the University of Oxford, and then he went back to Princeton. He went back to Oxford in 2011 as Royal Society Research Professor. Andrew's graduate research was assisted by John Coates. The reaserch was started in the summer of 1975. Together Andrew and John  worked on the arithmetic of elliptic curves with complex multiplication by the methods of Iwasawa theory. He later on worked with Barry Mazur on the conjecture of Iwasawa, over the rational numbers. Soon, he based all his reasearch to better assist him to prove Fermat's last theorem. 

Awards

Below is a list of awards that Andrew has earned throughout his career as a mathematician. 

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