Mathematics: today and tomorrow

摘要

In the 1860s James Clerk Maxwell wrote down the relativistic equations of light and radio waves, anticipating aspects of Ein-stein's theory by twenty years. R A Fisher developed the math-ematical theory of statistics in its modern form almost single-handedly in the 1920s whilst working at the Rothamsted Experimental Station; and Alan Turing used mathematics to decode the German enigma machines in the 1940s, developing the first computers in the process. In 1994, more than three hundred and fifty years after the problem was first posed, Andrew Wiles proved Fermat's Last Theorem; Wiles will return from the US to a post at Oxford later this year.