Shimura Memoire on André Weil

Goro Shimura (志村 五郎 born 23 February 1930) is a Japanese mathematician, and currently a professor emeritus of mathematics (former Michael Henry Strater Chair) at Princeton University

Shimura is known to a wider public through the important Modularity Theorem (previously known as the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture before being proven in the 1990s); Kenneth Ribet has shown that the famous Fermat’s Last Theorem (FLT) follows from a special case of this theorem. Shimura dryly commented that his first reaction on hearing of 1994 Andrew Wiles’s proof of the semi-stable case of the FLT theorem was ‘I told you so’.

Shimura’s mémoire on the 20th century great French mathematician André Weil (Fields Medal, Founder of Bourbaki):

1. Weil advised us not to stick to a wrong idea too long. “At some point you must be able to tell whether your idea is right or wrong; then you must have the guts…