THE solution to a 300-year-old mystery landed Oxford University Professor Sir Andrew Wiles the top international prize for mathematics yesterday.
Sir Andrew was awarded the 2016 Abel Prize, regarded as mathematics' equivalent of the Nobel Prize, for his work on Fermat's Last Theorem, which opened "a new era in number theory" according to judges.
Sir Andrew, Royal Society Research Professor of Mathematics at Oxford University, received the prize from Crown Prince Haakon of Norway at a ceremony in Oslo.
In 1994 Prof Wiles cracked the theorem, which at the time was the most famous, and long-running, unsolved problem in the subject’s history.
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