1954-

German Mathematician

Mathematician Gerd Faltings was born in Gelsenkirchen-Buer, Germany. Faltings undertook his graduate work at the University of Münster and completed his doctoral work in 1978. He then went on to do postdoctoral research at Harvard, taught at the University of Wuppertal, and eventually accepted a professorial appointment at Princeton University. In 1996 Faltings was invited to study at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn.

Faltings's proof of Mordell's conjecture earned him a 1986 Fields Medal and provided a major stepping stone toward the elusive proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, advanced in 1995 by fellow Princeton mathematics professor Andrew Wiles (1953- ).

Fermat's Last Theorem is a variation on the famous Pythagorean theorem stating that for right triangles the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the sides (x² + y² = z²). Both are based on Diophantine equations of the form...