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Who published a proof of Fermat's Last Theorem in the 1990s?

Answer

Andrew Wiles

Andrew Wiles proved Fermat's Last Theorem, announcing his work in 1993 and publishing a corrected and completed proof in 1995 with help from his former student Richard Taylor on a gap that had emerged during review. The statement is deceptively simple: there are no whole number solutions to a cubed plus b cubed equals c cubed, or to the same equation with any exponent above two. Pierre de Fermat scribbled in the margin of a book around 1637 that he had a marvellous proof which the margin was too small to contain, and mathematicians spent more than three centuries trying to reconstruct it. Wiles did not find Fermat's supposed argument. He worked instead on the modularity conjecture linking elliptic curves to modular forms, which others had shown would imply Fermat's claim, and he pursued it in near secrecy for seven years. Almost everyone now assumes Fermat's original proof was simply mistaken.

The proof runs to over a hundred pages and uses machinery that did not exist in Fermat's lifetime.

Why the other answers are wrong

  • Grigori Perelman. Perelman proved the Poincare conjecture in the early 2000s and famously declined the Fields Medal and the prize money.
  • Paul Erdos. Erdos was a prolific and itinerant collaborator in number theory and combinatorics who died in 1996.
  • Terence Tao. Tao is a wide-ranging mathematician known for work in analysis, combinatorics and prime number theory.

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