Andrew J. Wiles

Professor Andrew J. Wiles is the Royal Society Professor at University of Oxford. He came to the United States in 1977 as a Benjamin Pierce Instructor at Harvard University, where his collaboration with Barry Mazur resolved a long-standing conjecture in Iwasawa Theory. (Kenkichi Iwasawa was a professor of mathematics at Princeton from 1967 to 1986.) In 1982, Andrew was appointed professor of Mathematics at Princeton in 1994; he was named Eugene Higgins Professor of mathematics; and in 2009, he was named James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Mathematics. Andrew is world-famous for his proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem, a simple sounding statement that Pierre de Fermat (1607-1665) had writ­ten in the margin of his copy of Diophantus’ Arithmetica, along with the lament that the margin was too small to contain the proof. His long list of awards includes the Wolf Prize, the King Faisal Prize, and the Shaw Prize, as well as a knighthood. We wish Sir Andrew the very best in his new post at Oxford.