The journalists covering the story tended to concentrate on Fermat and mentioned Taniyama-Shimura only in passing, if at all. Shimura, a modest and gentle man, was not unduly bothered by the lack of attention given to his role in the proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem, but he was concerned that he and Taniyama had been relegated from being nouns to adjectives. “It is very curious that people write about the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture, but nobody writes about Taniyama and Shimura.”
