[1] As a student at Far Rockaway High School, Ribet was on a competitive mathematics team, but his first field of study was chemistry.

[6] Ribet's contributions in number theory and algebraic geometry were described by Benedict Gross and Barry Mazur as being "key to our understanding of the connections between the theory of modular forms and the ℓ-adic representations of the absolute Galois group of the field of rational numbers.

"[3] Ribet is credited with paving the way towards Andrew Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem.

Crucially it also followed that the full conjecture was not needed, but a special case, that of semistable elliptic curves, sufficed.

[13] For 2025 Ribet was awarded the AMS Leroy P. Steele Prize for Seminal Contribution to Research.