Kenneth Alan Ribet
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Kenneth Alan "Ken" Ribet is an American mathematician, currently a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley. His mathematical interests include algebraic number theory and algebraic geometry.
He is credited with paving the way towards Andrew Wiles's proof of Fermat's last theorem. Ribet proved that the epsilon conjecture which was established by Gerhard Frey was indeed true, and thereby proved that Fermat's Last Theorem would follow from the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture. Crucially it also followed that the full conjecture was not needed, but a special case, that of semistable elliptic curves, sufficed. An earlier theorem, the converse to Herbrand's theorem on the divisibility properties of Bernoulli numbers, is also related to Fermat's Last Theorem.
As a student at Far Rockaway High School, he was on a competitive mathematics team, but his first field of study was chemistry. He earned his bachelor's degree and master's degree from Brown University in 1969, and his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1973. In 1998, he received an honorary doctorate from Brown University. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1997 and the National Academy of Sciences in 2000.
He received the Fermat Prize in 1989.
