In 1993 Princeton University professor Andrew J. Wiles (born 1953) announced that he had solved one of the most legendary challenges in mathematics. Fermat's Last Theorem was an elegantly simple problem in need of a proof, and it had confounded mathematicians both professional and amateur for some 350 years. Wiles's successful cracking of the necessary code caused a stir in the math community and even landed him on the front page of the New York Times for solving what Science writer Barry Cipra asserted was "one of the unconquered peaks of mathematics."

Andrew J. Wiles was born April 11, 1953, in Cambridge, England, where his father was professor of theology at the famed medieval university there. In the Cambridge library the ten-year-old Wiles first came across Fermat's Last Theorem, and it intrigued him. He worked on it in his teens before realizing it was far more complex a challenge than he had originally...