The Proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem by R Taylor and A Wiles

Faltings G.

The proof of the conjecture mentioned in the title was finally completed in September of 1994. A. Wiles announced this result in the summer of 1993; however, there was a gap in his work. The paper of Taylor and Wiles does not close this gap but circumvents it. This article is an adaptation of several talks that I have given on this topic and is by no means about my own work. I have tried to present the basic ideas to a wider mathematical audience, and in the process I have skipped over certain details, which are in my opinion not so much of interest to the nonspecialist. The specialists can then alleviate their boredom by finding those mistakes and correcting them.