Virtues of Priority

The conjecture that every elliptic curve with rational coefficients is a so-called modular curve -- since 2000 a theorem due in large part to Andrew Wiles and, in complete generality, to Breuil-Conrad-Diamond-Taylor -- has been known by various names: Weil Conjecture, Taniyama-Weil Conjecture, Shimura-Taniyama-Weil Conjecture, or Shimura-Taniyama Conjecture, among others. The question of the authorship of this conjecture, one of whose corollaries is Fermat's Last Theorem, has been the subject of a priority dispute that has often been quite bitter, but the principles behind one attribution or another have (almost) never been made explicit. The author proposes a reading inspired in part by the "virtue ethics" of Alasdair MacIntyre, analyzing each of the attributions as the expression of a specific value, or virtue, appreciated by the community of mathematicians.

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