British mathematician Andrew Wiles has been named as the winner of the Abel Prize for 2016 for his contributions to mathematical sciences, the Norwegian Academy of Sciences and Letters said Tuesday.

Wiles, 62, won the prize "for his stunning proof of Fermat's Last Theorem by way of the modularity conjecture for semistable elliptic curves, opening a new era in number theory," the academy said in its award citation.

He will receive the financial award of 6 million Norwegian kroner (about 700,000 US dollars) from Norway's Crown Prince Haakon at an award ceremony in Oslo on May 24.

In 1994, Wiles cracked Fermat's Last Theorem, which at the time was the most famous and long-running unsolved problem in the subject's history.

Wiles was born on April 11, 1953 in Cambridge, England, and earned his bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1974 at Merton College, Oxford, and a PhD in 1980 at Clare College, Cambridge.

The Abel prize has been awarded annually since 2003 in memory of the Norwegian mathematics genius Niels Henrik Abel.