Andrew J. Wiles is one of very few mathematicians - if not the only - whose proof of a theorem has been international headline news. The award ceremony will be streamed and can be watched as a live web cast at www.abelprize.no. The Abel Prize carries a cash award of 6 million NOK.
In 1994 Andrew J. Wiles cracked Fermat’s Last Theorem, which at the time was the most famous, and long-running, unsolved problem in the subject’s history.
Wiles’ proof was not only the high point of his career - and an epochal moment for mathematics - but also the culmination of a remarkable personal journey that began three decades before. In 1963, when he was a ten-year-old boy growing up in Cambridge, England, Wiles found a copy of a book on Fermat’s Last Theorem in his local library. Wiles recalls that he was intrigued by the problem that he as a young boy could understand, and yet it had remained unsolved for three hundred years. “I knew from that moment that I would never let it go,” he said. “I had to solve it.”
Celebration of mathematical achievement
The award ceremony is a tribute to an extraordinary mathematical achievement.
The Abel Fanfare, composed by Klaus Sandvik, will be performed by musicians from the Staff Band of the Norwegian Armed Forces as the Abel Laureate enters the University Aula. He will be accompanied by members of the Abel committee, the chair of the Abel board and the President of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.
As a prelude to the award ceremony the audience will be invited on a journey into the history of the Abel Prize, starting in 2003, presented in pictures and words.
The Berlin-based filmmaker and mathematician Ekaterina Eremenko has visited Andrew J. Wiles at the University of Oxford where he is a Royal Society Research Professor. His address at the Mathematical Institute is the Andrew Wiles Building, which opened in 2013 and was named in his honour. In Eremenko’s film, which will be shown at the award ceremony, Wiles shares his thoughts about life and mathematics. Ekaterina Eremenko has also made the film “Colors of Math”.
After the showing of the film the chair of the Abel Committee, John Rognes, will give the reasons for the awarding of the 2016 Abel Prize to Sir Andrew J.
Wiles. The Abel Committee says: “Few results have as rich a mathematical history and as dramatic a proof as Fermat's Last Theorem.” John Rognes will then ask H.R.H. Crown Prince Haakon to come forward to present the Abel Prize to the laureate.
Following the award ceremony there will be a reception at Det Norske Teatret (The Norwegian Theatre). During the reception Andrew Wiles will be interviewed by Nadia Hasnaoui, a Norwegian journalist and television presenter.
In the evening the Norwegian Government will give a banquet at Akershus Castle, hosted by Prime Minister Erna Solberg, in honour of Abel laureate Sir Andrew J.Wiles.
More information about Abel Laureate Sir Andrew J. Wiles: www.abelprize.no