Institute For Advanced Study Congratulates 2005 Shaw Prize Laureate Andrew Wiles

The 2005 Shaw Prize in Mathematical Sciences has been awarded to Andrew Wiles, whose proof of Fermat's Last Theorem astounded mathematicians and the world. Wiles, currently the Eugene Higgins Professor of Mathematics at Princeton University, was a Member in the School of Mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study in 1981-82 and 1991-92, and was a long-term Member from 1995 to 2004.

In announcing the Prize on June 3 in Hong Kong, The Shaw Prize in Mathematical Sciences Committee of The Shaw Prize Foundation noted of Fermat's Last Theorem, "It remained the most famous unproven conjecture in mathematics for more than three centuries until 1994 when Wiles completed his long and difficult proof, which uses powerful mathematical ideas and insights developed in the 19th and 20th centuries." The award will be presented to Wiles in a ceremony in Hong Kong on September 2.

The Shaw Prize, which consists of three annual awards of $1 million each in astronomy, in life science and medicine and in mathematical sciences, was established in 2002 by Sir Run Run Shaw, a Hong Kong film and television producer. The international award, administered and managed through The Shaw Foundation, was created to honor individuals, regardless of race, nationality and religious belief, who have achieved significant breakthroughs in academic and scientific research or application, and whose work has resulted in a positive and profound impact on mankind. In addition to the Abel Prize and the Fields Medal, the Shaw Prize, dubbed the "Nobel of the East," is one of the major honors for achievements in mathematics.

Wiles is known for introducing novel methods that have dramatically advanced solutions to long-standing problems in number theory. Working alone and with others, he made groundbreaking advances on the Birch and Swinnerton conjectures, the main conjecture of Iwasawa theory, and the Shimura-Taniyama-Weil conjecture, leading to his proof of Fermat's Last Theorem. Wiles is the second recipient of the Shaw Prize, first awarded in 2004 to fellow Institute Member and geometer Shiing-Shen Chern (School of Mathematics, 1943-46, 1954-55 and 1964-65), who died at the age of 93 in December 2004.

Peter Goddard, Director of the Institute, commented, "Andrew Wiles' work will always rank as one of the great achievements of mathematics. The inspiring story of his dedicated and successful pursuit of this famous problem captured the popular imagination. The Institute congratulates Professor Wiles on his accomplishments and his winning the Shaw Prize, and we have been honored to have him as a long-time Member of the Institute."

Wiles was born in Cambridge, England, in 1953. He completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge in 1980, and after a stay at the Sonderforschungsbereich Theoretische Mathematik in Bonn, Wiles came for the first of three visits to the Institute for Advanced Study in 1981-82. He was appointed professor at Princeton University in 1982, and after being awarded a Guggenheim fellowship, spent a year at the Institut des Hautes �tudes Scientifique and the �cole Normale Sup�rieure, Paris, in 1985-86. It was at this point that he began to concentrate on attempting to prove the Shimura-Taniyama conjecture, work that spanned seven years and eventually led to his proof of Fermat's Last Theorem. In 1991-92, Wiles came to the Institute for a second time, and returned in 1995 as a long-term Member.

In 1993, at a series of lectures given at the Isaac Newton Institute in Cambridge, Wiles announced that he had a proof of the Theorem. As the results were prepared for publication, a subtle error was found, and Wiles spent the following year resolving the problem with his former PhD student, Richard Taylor. The paper "Modular elliptical curves and Fermat's Last Theorem" was published in 1995 in the Annals of Mathematics, officially solving a problem that had confounded mathematicians and amateurs alike for almost four centuries.

Wiles is the recipient of the Schock Prize in Mathematics from the Royal Swedish Academy of Science (1995); Prix Fermat from the Universit� Paul Sabatier (1995); and the Wolf Prize (1996), among many other honors. He was elected as a foreign member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1996, and received its mathematics award the same year.