Fermat’s last theorem, a riddle put forward by one of history’s great mathematicians, had baffled experts for more than 300 years. Then a genius toiled in secret for seven years to solve it, according to the usual narrative. That shy Englishman, Andrew Wiles, made his feat public in the early 1990s and amassed a glittering array of tributes. In 2016, he won the Abel Prize, math’s top award. It came with a $700,000 purse.
Now, a wealthy Texas philanthropist is recounting how his financial support created a community of Fermat innovators that, over decades, lent moral and mathematical support to Dr. Wiles. That patronage drew top mathematicians to the puzzle after great minds had given up, succeeded in bringing the moribund field back to life, and may have helped make Dr. Wiles’s breakthrough possible.
“We solved the problem,” the philanthropist, James M. Vaughn Jr., 82, president of the Vaughn Foundation Fund, said in an interview. “If we hadn’t put the program together as we did, it would still be unsolved.”
In interviews, top experts described Mr. Vaughn’s foundation and its early financial support as sparks that had lit an intellectual fire, although they stopped short of saying that his backing had been responsible for Dr. Wiles’s Fermat breakthrough. Dr. Wiles did not respond to inquiries.
Recently, Mr. Vaughn gave the University of Texas a collection of 125 rare and foundational books in the history of mathematics, and the gift has prompted him to speak publicly of other foundation projects that have gone largely unheralded.
While gregarious, Mr. Vaughn, heir to a Texas oil fortune, is an extremely private man who has never before claimed publicly that his philanthropy begot the mathematical feat. Even so, he takes immense pride in what he characterizes as his legacy. Mr. Vaughn said that he and his wife had no children and that the Fermat triumph was how he hoped he would be remembered.