A Tribute to Yves Hellegouarch

Honorary founder of the Journal of Mathematics and Music, Yves Hellegouarch was a French mathematician. He spent most of his career at the University of Caen. A former student of the École Normale Supérieure (ENS), he was a student at the National Conservatory of Music in Paris, where he studied cello with Maurice Maréchal and chamber music with Maurice Hewitt. In 1954, he decided to pursue a career in mathematics. He specialized in number theory, and all his life worked on Fermat’s last theorem. He introduced special elliptic curves, which are now called Frey curves, in honor of the German mathematician Gerhard Frey. The latter discovered that one of these curves, introduced by Yves Hellegouarch, was a potential counter-example to the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture. This result was proved by Jean-Pierre Serre and Ken Ribet, and this was the starting point for the proof of Fermat’s conjecture obtained by Andrew Wiles in 1994. Three years later, Yves Hellegouarch presented all of this work in a well-known book Invitation aux mathématiques de Fermat-Wiles.