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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 established the epsilon conjecture, 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.
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