[2] Wiles was discovered on 29 September 1973, by Dutch astronomer couple Ingrid and Cornelis van Houten at Leiden and Tom Gehrels at Palomar Observatory, California, United States.

[11] The asteroid is a member of the Koronis family, a collisional group consisting of a few hundred known bodies with nearly ecliptical orbits.

[9] In early 2014, two rotational lightcurves of Wiles were obtained from photometric observations in the R-band at the Palomar Transient Factory in California.

[6][7] According to the survey carried out by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer with its subsequent NEOWISE mission, Wiles measures 7.148 kilometers in diameter and its surface has an albedo of 0.262,[4][5] while the Collaborative Asteroid Lightcurve Link assumes a standard albedo for members of the Koronis family of 0.24, and calculates a diameter of 17.12 kilometers with an absolute magnitude of 11.0.

[3] This minor planet was named after of Andrew J. Wiles (born 1953), a British mathematician and professor at Princeton University, who is best known for proving Fermat's Last Theorem in 1993.