Gustavo Åhlén

This morning I was reading this “great” news about Medicine.

Elizabeth Blackburn, Carol Greider and Jack Szostak of the US have won this year’s Nobel Prize for Medicine, it was announced in Stockholm Monday.

The three scientists solved a fundamental problem in biology on ‘how chromosomes can be copied in a complete way and how they are protected against degradation’, the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute said.

The statement said the trio were cited for the discovery of ‘how chromosomes are protected by telomeres and the enzyme telomerase’.

The discovery had ’stimulated the development of new therapeutic strategies’, the Nobel Assembly said.

The medicine prize is the first of the 2009 Nobel awards to be announced.

Andrew Wiles’ most famous mathematical result is that all rational semistable elliptic curves are modular which, in particular, implies Fermat’s Last Theorem.

Wiles was introduced to Fermat’s Last Theorem at the age of ten. He tried to prove the theorem using textbook methods and later studied the work of mathematicians who had tried to prove it. When he began his graduate studies he stopped trying to prove it and began studying elliptic curves under the supervision of John Coates.

In the 1950s and 1960s a connection between elliptic curves and modular forms was conjectured by the Japanese mathematician Goro Shimura based on some ideas that Yutaka Taniyama posed. In the West it became well known through a paper by André Weil. With Weil giving conceptual evidence for it, it is sometimes called the Shimura-Taniyama-Weil conjecture. It states that every rational elliptic curve is modular. The full conjecture was proven by Christophe Breuil, Brian Conrad, Fred Diamond, and Richard Taylor in 1998 using many of the methods that Andrew Wiles used in his 1995 published papers.

from wikipedia.