Sir Andrew John Wiles is an English 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 was awarded the 2016 Abel Prize and the 2017 Copley Medal and for which he was appointed a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2000. In 2018, Wiles was appointed the first Regius Professor of Mathematics at Oxford. Wiles is also a 1997 MacArthur Fellow.
Wiles in 2005
Andrew Wiles in front of the statue of Pierre de Fermat in Beaumont-de-Lomagne in 1995, Fermat's birthplace in southern France
Number theory is a branch of pure mathematics devoted primarily to the study of the integers and arithmetic functions. German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855) said, "Mathematics is the queen of the sciences—and number theory is the queen of mathematics." Number theorists study prime numbers as well as the properties of mathematical objects constructed from integers, or defined as generalizations of the integers.
The distribution of prime numbers is a central point of study in number theory. This Ulam spiral serves to illustrate it, hinting, in particular, at the conditional independence between being prime and being a value of certain quadratic polynomials.
The Plimpton 322 tablet
Leonhard Euler
"Here was a problem, that I, a ten-year-old, could understand, and I knew from that moment that I would never let it go. I had to solve it." —Sir Andrew Wiles about his proof of Fermat's Last Theorem.
