On this day 72 years ago, on April 11th, 1953 (February 28th, 1953 in the lunar calendar), Andrew Wiles, the terminator of Fermat's Last Theorem, was born. Since French mathematicians put forward Fermat's last theorem, no one has been able to prove it for more than 300 years. It was not until the 1990s that British mathematician Wiles officially declared to the world that he had proved Fermat's last theorem. It is said that Wiles used extremely complicated methods of modern advanced mathematics to prove Fermat's last theorem, and the process of proof was written over a hundred leaves of paper. I'm afraid no one except Wiles himself can really fully understand such a complicated and lengthy proof. So Wiles's proof is still controversial and questionable today. People have reason to ask, did Wiles really prove Fermat's last theorem? Sir Andrew John Wiles, KBE, FRS (Sir Andrew John Wiles, April 11, 1953-, surname also translated as Weiles) is a British mathematician living in the United States. He received his PhD from the University of Cambridge in 1979. Andrew Wiles' father was Rev. Prof. Maurice Wiles, a theologian. Proof process of Fermat's last theorem In 1994, he proved Fermat's last theorem, which puzzled mathematicians for more than 300 years, which was a major breakthrough in mathematics. Richard Taylor was his assistant in the process. Before that, Wiles had done excellent work in number theory. In collaboration with John Coates, initial progress was made on the famous Behe and Swinerton-Dale conjecture. He also did the main work on Lord Iwasawa's conjecture. He has been a professor at Princeton. Fermat's Last Theorem states that for a positive integer n greater than 2, the following indefinite equation has no positive integer solution: Wiles read Fermat's Last Theorem as a child in Eric Temple Bell's book The Last Problem, which inspired him to solve conjectures. His long journey to solving problems began in 1985, when Ken Ribet, inspired by Jean-Pierre Searle and Gerhard Frey, proved that the Taniyama Shimura conjecture could derive Fermat's final theorem. The Taniyama-Shimura-Weil conjecture states that all elliptic curves have parametric representations in modular form. Although this conjecture is not as famous as Fermat's last theorem, it is more important because it touches the core of number theory, but no one can prove it. Working in secret, Wiles only corresponds with Nicholas Katz, another mathematics professor at Princeton University, sharing ideas and progress. He finally proved the special case of this conjecture, and solved Fermat's last conjecture. His proofs are ingenious and create many new concepts. Wiles'testimony came public with extraordinary drama. In June 1993, he arranged three lectures at the Newton Institute, and did not disclose his lecture topics in advance. But the audience and the public discovered the ultimate purpose of the speech and caused a stir, and the crowd filled the lecture hall of the third speech. In the following months, the manuscript of the proof was circulated among a few mathematicians, while the public waited for the verification results. The first version of the proof relied on constructing an object called an Euler system, but something went wrong in this respect. Peer review found mistakes in fine and complex mathematics. Almost a year later, Wiles's proof seemed as fatal as many others. Although he made many important discoveries, he ultimately failed to achieve its goal. When Wiles was about to give up, he decided to make one last try, working with his former doctor, Physiologist Taylor, to solve the final problem in the proof. Finally, he adopted a method that was not used in the first version, and made a breakthrough, thus proving Fermat's final theorem. He commented: "¡­ Suddenly, I didn't expect such an incredible revelation. It was the most important moment in my working life. I no longer value the future work so much ¡­ It was indescribably beautiful, so simple and beautiful that I stared at it for twenty minutes, and then paced the department all day, often coming back to my desk to see that it was still there-it was still there." The final version of Wiles's proof was thus different from the original. This is evidenced in Annal of Mathematics, 141, 1995, pages 443-551. Immediately following the paper is another supplementary paper he co-authored with Taylor entitled Ring-theoretic properties of certain Heckealgebras, which is published on pages 553-572. Wiles won the Schock Prize in 1995, the Royal Medal, Wolfe Prize and Cole Prize in 1996, and the first special prize of the International Mathematical Union awarded by yuri manin, chairman of the Fields Medal Committee in 1998 (the reason why he was awarded the special prize instead of the Fields Medal was that he had exceeded the upper age limit of 40 years for winning the Fields Medal that year), and won the Shaw Prize in 2005.