Rethinking Attribution: Beyond a Single Genius
While Andrew Wiles’s achievement is remarkable, attributing the breakthrough solely to his mind oversimplifies the collaborative nature of mathematical progress. Wiles built upon centuries of cumulative work, insights, and methods developed by many mathematicians. His success was not a sudden epiphany but rather the culmination of a long intellectual tradition, highlighting that breakthroughs in mathematics are rarely the product of isolated genius but rather of a collective pursuit of knowledge.