Paul Wolfskehl and the Wolfskehl Prize

1294 NOTICES OF THE AMS VOLUME 44, NUMBER 10 T o the question often posed to Andrew Wiles in interviews— namely, what fascinated him so greatly in the Fermat conjecture—he seldom refrained from answering by emphasizing the long history of this problem. When I asked him the same question in Boston in 1995, he answered, “Because of its romantic history.” When I then went further and asked him to explain to me in more detail what he meant by romantic, he answered merely, “Because Fermat said he had a proof, but none was found.” That Wiles avoided answering in detail what is so romantic about the history of Fermat’s Last Theorem reflects the fact that he also has a particularly romantic part to play in this story. The first time that I became aware of this was on October 28, 1995, the day after the awarding of the Prix Fermat to Wiles in the Salle des Illustres in the town hall in Toulouse. It was the last true day of autumn, with striking blue skies and temperatures worthy of summer, when Andrew Wiles visited the house in which Fermat was born in Beaumont-de-Lomagne. There he found the people in the highest of spirits on account of his mastering of this ancient enigma, and he was truly the man of the hour in this small relaxed town in the south of France, whose character had scarcely changed since the time of Fermat himself: Andrew had met Pierre. Wiles also met the romance in the history of Fermat’s Last Theorem on June 27, 1997, in Göttingen, where he was presented with the Wolfskehl Prize by the Academy of Science. Gerhard Frey gave the closing lecture, “On the Fermat problem, the conjecture of Taniyama and the theorem of Wiles”. Since so much nonsense has been written about this prize and also about its donor Paul Wolfskehl, even by respected authors, and taken up blindly by other authors, I now see, through the presenting of this prize and the public awareness that goes with it, the last opportunity to do Paul Wolfskehl and his donation the justice they deserve. Klaus Barner is professor of mathematics at the University of Kassel, Germany. His e-mail address is klaus@ mathematik.uni-kassel.de. “This article is an updated and revised translation of my paper ‘Paul Wolfskehl und der Wolfskehlpreis’, Mathematische Schriften Kassel, Vordruckreihe des Fachbereichs 17, Preprint Nr. 4/97, March 1997. I would like to thank Alex Reckless for his valuable help during the process of translating. In my attempt to learn more about Wolfskehl and his family, I have been greatly assisted by Kurt-R. Biermann, Eckhart G. Franz, Erhard Heil, Paul Hoffmann, Charlotte Kühner-Wolfskehl, Sabine Rickmann, Heinz Georg Wagner, and Ingeborg Wolfskehl. I thank them all deeply. Special thanks go to Ingeborg Wolfskehl for letting me have a copy of the possibly last existing photo of Paul Wolfskehl.”