Part 3/9:
Andrew Wiles first encountered Fermat’s Last Theorem at the age of 10 while exploring a library in Cambridge, England. In his own words from Simon Singh’s Fermat’s Enigma, Wiles described the moment as one of realization: “I knew from that moment that I would never let it go. I had to solve it.” This burgeoning enthusiasm transformed into a lifelong obsession with the theorem.
As a graduate student in the 1970s at the University of Cambridge, Wiles was encouraged by his supervisor, John Coates, to delve into elliptic curves, a critical element for eventually cracking Fermat’s Last Theorem. Concurrently, Japanese mathematicians Yutaka Taniyama and Goro Shimura posited the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture, which proposed a connection between elliptic curves and modular forms.