Mathematical Sciences: Workshop on Fermat's Last Theorem; August 9-18, 1995, Boston, Massachusetts

该奖项为将于1995年8月在波士顿大学举行的题为费马大定理的会议提供支持。会议将集中讨论两个主要话题：(1)Andrew Wiles最近对半稳定椭圆曲线的Taniyama-Shimura-Weil猜想的证明；(2)Frey，Serre和Ribet的早期工作，表明Wiles定理将完成Fermat大定理的证明。这次会议主要面向高级研究生和最近获得博士学位的学生，但对于寻求掌握费马大定理证明中使用的强大工具的更有经验的数学家来说，它也将是有价值的。此外，波士顿大学PROMYS项目的约80名高中生和本科生将参加更一般的会议活动，从而增强这些年轻人在PROMYS方面的体验，并加强数学是一项蓬勃发展的现代研究活动。会议的主题属于算术几何的一般数学领域。这个超现代的研究领域结合了两个最古老的数学分支：数论和几何。这种结合产生的新见解正在产生越来越强大的工具来解决费马最后定理等长期存在的问题，该定理抵制了三个多世纪以来数学家们最强大的努力。此外，虽然算术几何有时被认为是最纯粹的数学之一，但它也一直在开发有洞察力的新技术，导致纠错码和密码学等应用领域的巨大进步。

This award provides support for a conference entitled Fermat's Last Theorem to be held in August 1995 at Boston University. The conference will focus on two major topics: (1) Andrew Wiles' recent proof of the Taniyama-Shimura-Weil conjecture for semistable elliptic curves; and (2) the earlier works of Frey, Serre and Ribet showing that Wiles' Theorem would complete the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem. The conference is aimed primarily at advanced graduate students and recent PhD recipients, but it will also be valuable to more experienced mathematicians seeking to master the powerful tools used in the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem. In addition, about 80 high school students and undergraduates from Boston University's PROMYS program will join the more general conference activities, thereby enhancing these young people's experience in PROMYS and reinforcing that mathematics is a flourishing modern research activity. The themes of the conference belong to the general mathematical area of Arithmetic Geometry. This ultramodern research area combines two of the oldest branches of mathematics: number theory and geometry. The new insights arising out of this combination are producing increasingly powerful tools to solve longstanding problems like Fermat's Last Theorem, which have resisted the strongest efforts of over three centuries of mathematicians. In addition, though Arithmetic Geometry is sometimes regarded as among the purest of pure mathematics, it has also been developing insightful new techniques leading to dramatic progress in such applied areas as error-correcting codes and cryptography.