Andrew John Wiles (born 11 April 1953) is the chair of the mathematics department at Princeton University[1]. Professor Wiles will make a permanent move to Oxford University in 2011 to assume a Royal Society Professorship. He is famous for his non-elementary proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, for which he was knighted in the UK.
Wiles took seven years to develop his proof. His initial proof of June 23, 1993 was full of many new ideas developing the work of many modern mathematicians, but it was soon found to contain an error. In part, it involved proving the Taniyama–Shimura conjecture. On the morning of September 19, 1994 Wiles had the insight that the specific reason why the Flach approach would not work directly suggested a new approach with the Horizontal Iwasawa Theory (which he had abandoned three years earlier) which resolved all of the previous issues with the latter and resulted in a CNF that was valid for all of the required cases. He published a modified proof in May 1995 and this has been accepted as valid.