Campus Faculty Partner
ribet@berkeley.edu
Ken Ribet is a Berkeley math professor, now emeritus but still teaching math courses. On campus, he serves as a Senior Fellow at the Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science. Ribet is best known for his work in number theory and arithmetic geometry, and especially for his contribution to the proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem: Ribet proved that the theorem would follow logically from the modularity conjecture, then a well-known unproved statement about elliptic curves. After Andrew Wiles obtained cases of this conjecture, Fermat’s Last Theorem became a corollary because of Ribet’s prior work. Ribet served as President of the American Mathematical Society for two years beginning in February, 2017, and has just concluded terms as a member of Council and chair of mathematics at the National Academy of Sciences. Ribet received the Fermat Prize in 1989 and the Brouwer Medal from the Royal Dutch Mathematical Society in 2017. In 1989, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by his alma mater, Brown University.