Which mathematician is credited with proving Fermat’s Last Theorem in 1994?

Andrew Wiles is credited with proving Fermat’s Last Theorem in 1994.

Fermat’s Last Theorem states that no positive integers a, b, and c satisfy aⁿ + bⁿ = cⁿ when n is an integer greater than 2. Pierre de Fermat wrote the claim in the margin of a book around 1637 and asserted that he had a proof, but no proof was found for centuries.

British mathematician Andrew Wiles announced a proof in 1993 during lectures at the University of Cambridge. A gap was discovered during checking, and Wiles worked with Richard Taylor to repair it. The corrected proof was published in 1995, although 1994 is associated with the completed proof and its public resolution.

The argument did not attack every exponent directly. It used deep results about elliptic curves and modular forms, including the semistability case of the modularity theorem. Wiles received the 1998 Wolfskehl Prize and the 2016 Abel Prize for this achievement. Grigori Perelman solved the Poincaré conjecture, a different famous problem.