Tim May wrote:

Consider Andrew Wiles, Princeton math professor, and the prover of Fermat's Last Theorem. He labored in secrecy for many years, only going public when he felt his results were complete. (As it turned out, they were not, and he needed another year or two to fill in some gaps.)

You may have seen the same TV show I saw on him. I really enjoyed it. Is there any evidence that he got (ahem) outside funding for his project? In the back of my paranoid mind, I wondered that since he was dealing with elliptic curves and modular arithmetic if... I mean, how did he pay his mortgage? The show implied that he was not doing any real teaching most of that time, and if no one at the school knew of his work, then where was the money coming from? --David Miller