Andrew Wiles

British mathematician who proved Fermat's Last Theorem, a problem that had fascinated him since childhood, working largely in secret for seven years at Princeton University. He announced a proof in June 1993 by establishing a special case of the modularity theorem sufficient to imply Fermat's claim; reviewers found a gap in the argument later that year, and Wiles, with his former student Richard Taylor, spent another year repairing it before a corrected proof was published in 1995. He received a special silver plaque from the International Mathematical Union in 1998 (too old, at over forty, for the Fields Medal's own age limit) and the Abel Prize in 2016 for the achievement.