【Master Forum】Fibonacci's "Book of Squares" and the Congruent Number Problem
Topic: Fibonacci's "Book of Squares" and the Congruent Number Problem
Speaker: Prof. Kenneth A. Ribet
Date: Wednesday, December 17th, 2025
Time: 10:30 a.m. - 11:45 a.m.
Venue: SIN Wai Kin International Conference Centre (W201), Administration Building
Language: English
Abstract:?
I intend to present elementary talk about the Congruent Number Problem.? This problem is an open question in number theory that is related to the explorations of Fibonacci and Fermat and to the modern theory of elliptic curves.
Speaker Profile:
Kenneth Ribet is Distinguished Professor of Mathematics Emeritus and Professor of the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley. Ken 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 joined the Berkeley faculty in 1978.
Ribet works in number theory and algebraic geometry. He is best known for his 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 elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1997 and the US National Academy of Sciences in 2000. He was awarded the Fermat Prize in 1989 and received an honorary PhD from Brown University in 1998. He received the Brouwer medal from the Royal Dutch Mathematical Society (KWG) in 2017 and the Steele Prize for Seminal Research Contribution from the American Mathematical Society in 2025.? He serves currently as a Senior Fellow at the Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science on the Berkeley campus.
