Princeton - PWB 091398 - IMU creates silver plaque for Wiles

Princeton Weekly Bulletin September 13, 1998

IMU creates silver plaque for Wiles

Eugene Higgins Professor of Mathematics Andrew Wiles, who made worldwide headlines five years ago when he announced a proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, was honored with a special silver plaque on August 18 by the International Mathematical Union during the International Congress of Mathematicians in Berlin.

He received the plaque at the congress's opening ceremony, when the Fields Medal is awarded. The Fields, considered the highest honor in mathematics, is awarded only every four years and only to mathematicians age 40 or younger. (There is no Nobel Prize in mathematics.) Wiles, now 45, was just past 40 when he completed his final proof solving Fermat's problem.

On August 19 Wiles gave a lecture, "Twenty Years of Number Theory," which received an ovation from the 1,500 conference attendees on hand; an estimated 700 more watched from an overflow site.

This year's Fields Medallists are Richard Borcherds and Timothy Gowers of Cambridge University, Curtis McMullen of Harvard University and Maxim Kontsevich of the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques.

Wiles has received many accolades for his proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, which baffled mathematicians for more than 350 years.

In the late 1630s, French mathematician Pierre de Fermat wrote a note in a book regarding the statement: "For each whole number n, greater than 2, the equation xⁿ + yⁿ = zⁿ has no solutions that are positive whole numbers." Fermat wrote, "I have a truly marvelous demonstration of this proposition which this margin is too narrow to contain."

Wiles first read about the theorem as a boy, and he spent a total of eight years in search of a proof. He first announced a solution on June 23, 1993, at the conclusion of a lecture at the Isaac Newton Institute in Cambridge, England. When mathematicians raised questions about his proof, Wiles himself noticed a flaw. That sent him back to work for nearly a year. In October 1994, Wiles unveiled his revised proof, which has been confirmed by experts in the field.