The mathematicians who gathered in a Cambridge University lecture room last Monday had no idea that they were about to witness history. They had come to hear Andrew Wiles, an English colleague based at Princeton University, give three one-hour lectures on "Modular Forms, Elliptic Curves and Galois Representations," an abstract topic even by the rarefied standards of higher math. By the end of the first hour, though, they knew something was up. Recalls Nigel Boston, a visiting mathematician at Cambridge's Isaac Newton Institute: "We realized where he could be heading. People were giving each other wide-eyed looks." By the end of...
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