There is a tenuous link between Andrew Wiles and the UZ Maths Department. The person who (as his supervisor) introduced Andrew to the areas of maths related to the Taniyama-Shimura-Weil Conjecture was John Coates, a professor at Cambridge. He is actually an Australian mathie, having done his undergraduate degree at the Australian National University. A year ahead of him was one Alastair Stewart, now a Professor HERE. (small world, n'est-ce pas?)
According to Stewart, the joke around the ANU campus was that when he was doing his BSc dissertation, someone had forgotten to tell his supervisor that he wasn't a postgraduate student. (I'm told John got two papers out of his undergraduate research - I'll be lucky if I get that many for my doctoral thesis!) How did he become so good? Obviously he had a natural ability for the subject, but that's only the tip of the iceberg. The remaining part is practice practice practice. According to his professor Hanna Neumann, ``other good students would do 5 problems a day and get 5 right. John would do 50 problems a day and get 20 right.''
Apocryphal or not, that tale speaks for itself. Well, it will if you think hard enough.} [The message here is: it's not what percentage you get right, it's how hard you wrestled with as many problems as possible...]
Related link: The story of Fermat's Last Theorem