Wiles, Ribet, Shimura-Taniyama-Weil
and Fermat's Last Theorem


Much of the material that seeded this archive was copied from the former gopher archive pertaining to "Fermat's Last Theorem" at e-math.ams.org.

This archive is no longer being updated since its topic has reached full maturity. The gopher links in this archive have been made inoperative. That technology did provide a very efficient way to serve mailbox archives online.

Comments and problem reports should be sent to: W. F. Hammond <hammond à math · a1bany · édu>.


Proof of the full modular curve conjecture
Richard Taylor's web site contains a preprint of an article by C. Breuil, B. Conrad, F. Diamond, and Taylor, ``On the modularity of elliptic curves over Q ...'', to appear in J. Amer. Math. Soc..
Instructional Conference on Fermat's Last Theorem, August 2000
For advanced graduate students in mathematics, August 6-18 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Nigel Boston and Chris Skinner, are the organizers.
Karl Rubin's Washington Lecture, January 2000
AMS-MAA-SIAM joint meeting lecture on Ranks of Elliptic Curves. At the same location see also his May 1999 "SUMO" lecture on the areas of rational right triangles (yet another topic related to elliptic curves [YATREC]) and more.
Modular Forms, Elliptic Curves, and Related Topics, January 2000
A special session organized for the joint mathematics meeting in Washington, D.C. of the AMS and the MAA.
Modularity of Elliptic Curves and Beyond, Dec. 1999, at MSRI
A "Hot Topics" meeting at MSRI, Berkeley. The meeting will cover the recent proof of the full modular curve conjecture by Breuil, Conrad, Diamond, and Taylor, which follows the general outline of the celebrated 1993-94 work of Wiles and Taylor, as well as related developments on elliptic curves, modular forms, and Galois representations.
A report of progress on full Shimura-Taniyama-Weil
From the UseNet newsgroup sci.math.research. This report is confirmed by a small news item in the September 1999 Notices of the American Mathematical Society (vol. 46, no. 8 at p. 863).
Barry Mazur is honored by Harvard, October, 1998
Barry Mazur, who was a force behind both the work of K. Ribet (1986) in showing that Fermat's Last Theorem is a consequence of the Shimura-Taniyama-Weil Conjecture and the work of A. Wiles and R. Taylor (1993, 1994) in carving out enough of that conjecture, has become the first member of the Department of Mathematics at Harvard to be promoted to the extraordinary rank of University Professor. Original source: http://www.news.harvard.edu/hno.subpages/gazarch/hno.gazette.oct.29.html
Number Theory and Arithmetic Geometry, 1998-1999
A theme year of the Centre de Reserches Mathématiques (CRM), Université de Montréal.
Karl Rubin's Materials
This site includes lecture notes and preprints.
Public Television's Nova production The Proof
Billed in advance as: the story of Andrew Wiles, the Princeton mathematician who cracked the proof of a simple equation that had eluded the great minds of science for more than 350 years. This presentation, which aired on October 28, 1997 in the United States, shares authorship with the recent (1997) trade book Fermat's Enigma by Simon Singh and the January 1996 BBC Horizon Production (see below). It appears to share common source material with the 1997 trade book Fermat's Last Theorem by Amir D. Aczel.
Conference on elliptic curves and applications (March, 1997)
Meeting in Baltimore at The Johns Hopkins University under the auspices of JAMI, the Japan-U.S. Mathematics Institute. Other years of JAMI activities have relevance to the arithmetic of elliptic curves.
Washington D.C., March, 1996: Elliptic Curves and Modular Forms
Sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences and organized by Barry Mazur (Harvard) and Karl Rubin (Ohio State)
Log of mail received about the Washington meeting

Log of miscellaneous items (e.g., BBC TV)
In fact, the script of the BBC Horizon TV production had been available through the Web. There is a review of the BBC program by Andrew Granville in the January 1997 issue of the Notices of the AMS. [This URL, too, seems to have been moved.]
Meeting at Boston University, August 9-18, 1995
The proceedings of this meeting have been published as:

G. Cornell, J. H. Silverman, & G. Stevens,
Modular Forms and Fermat's Last Theorem,
Springer-Verlag, 1997.

Someone looking for "the proof" should start with this volume.

Meeting at Boston Univ: Pre-Meeting Suggested Reading (DVI)

Denouement: Annals, May 1995.
The May, 1995 issue of the Annals of Mathematics contains the definitive articles by Wiles and by Wiles and Taylor that prove the semi-stable case of the Shimura-Taniyama-Weil conjecture.
Prior notes for K. Ribet's AMS 1994 Summer Meeting (Minnesota) talk

SLIDES from K. Ribet's Cincinnati talk, Jan 13, 1994 (TeX source)

SLIDES from K. Ribet's Cincinnati talk, Jan 13, 1994 (TeX DVI)

Partial log of AMS FLT mailing list September 1994 - present

Partial log of AMS FLT mailing list July 1993 - August 1994

Listmail: How to join the AMS "Fermat's Last Theorem" mailing list

Bibliography on the modularity conjecture by David Goss

Albany "Everyone Seminar" Talk by W. F. Hammond

History of Fermat's Last Theorem (Andrew Granville)

From the Taniyama-Shimura Conjecture to FLT (Ribet) (TeX source)
The proof, from the mid 1980's, that Fermat's Last Theorem is a consequence of the Shimura-Taniyama-Weil conjecture is contained in this article and in the article

K. A. Ribet, "On modular representations of Gal(\bar{Q}/Q) arising from modular forms", Inventiones Mathematicae, vol. 100 (1990), pp. 431-476.

From the Taniyama-Shimura Conjecture to FLT (Ribet) (DVI)

Early correspondence about Wiles' result

Reports of a "gap"

AMS Announcement from 1993

Keith Matthews' Number Theory Web
This is an excellent web entrance for number theory generally. It includes a long list of number theorists.

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