[nwjtkjn]

Tenured at Princeton, had already solved some fairly big problems in the field, and it helped that FLT had recently been "reduced" to proving a conjecture about elliptic curves which were already very much in Wiles's wheelhouse.

Not to take away from his achievement, but I think it is not stressed enough how much the proof depends on work from previous decades that a priori had nothing to do with Fermat.