Math Professor Wins $700,000 for Solving 300-Year-Old Theorem

British mathematician Sir Andrew J. Wiles has won the Abel Prize in math for cracking a centuries-old hypothesis.

Princeton University mathematics professor Andrew John Wiles poses next to "Fermat's Last Theorem" written on a chalkboard in his Princeton, N.J., office Tuesday, Jan. 6, 1998. Wiles, 44, a native of Cambridge, England, was awarded the $200,000 1998 King Faisal International Prize for solving the 350-year-old mathematical puzzle that scores of mathematicians could not. AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast

British mathematician Sir Andrew J. Wiles has won the Abel Prize in math for cracking a centuries-old hypothesis.

The Abel Prize comes with a $710,000 reward. 

Norway’s Academy of Science and Letters said Tuesday he was given the annual award “for his stunning proof of (French mathematician Pierre de) Fermat’s Last Theorem by way of the modularity conjecture for semi-stable elliptic curves, opening a new era in number theory.”

[It was] the most famous, and long-running, unsolved problem in the subject's history.