Research Interests
Kenneth Ribet is Distinguished Professor of Mathematics at UC, Berkeley. Ribet studied at Brown University and Harvard University. He received his PhD in 1973 from Harvard, where his advisor was John Tate. After three years of teaching in Princeton and two years of research in Paris, Ribet moved to Berkeley in 1978. Ribet works in number theory and algebraic geometry, especially on modular forms and modular curves. He is best known for his 1986 proof that Fermat's Last Theorem would follow logically from the modularity conjecture, then a well-known unproved conjecture about elliptic curves. When Andrew Wiles obtained cases of this conjecture in 1995, Wiles obtained Fermat's Last Theorem as a corollary because of Ribet's prior work. Ribet was recently President of the American Mathematical Society and now serves on the Council of the US National Academy of Sciences. Ribet is an editor of PNAS, as well as a member of the editorial board of several mathematics journals.
Additional Terms
Miller Professor, Fall 1990, Mathematics
Symposium Chair, 2024 - 2025
