Andrew Wiles Quotes

I tried to fit it in with some previous broad conceptual understanding of some part of mathematics that would clarify the particular problem I was thinking about.

Pure mathematicians just love to try unsolved problems - they love a challenge.

Always try the problem that matters most to you.

I had this rare privilege of being able to pursue in my adult life, what had been my childhood dream.

Mathematicians aren't satisfied because they know there are no solutions up to four million or four billion, they really want to know that there are no solutions up to infinity.

The definition of a good mathematical problem is the mathematics it generates rather than the problem itself.

I grew up in Cambridge in England, and my love of mathematics dates from those early childhood days.

The greatest problem for mathematicians now is probably the Riemann Hypothesis.

I never use a computer.

However impenetrable it seems, if you don't try it, then you can never do it.

Just because we can't find a solution it doesn't mean that there isn't one.

Fermat said he had a proof.

I know it's a rare privilege, but if one can really tackle something in adult life that means that much to you, then it's more rewarding than anything I can imagine.

Then when I reached college, I realized that many people had thought about the problem during the 18th and 19th centuries and so I studied those methods.

Mathematics... is a bit like discovering oil. ... But mathematics has one great advantage over oil, in that no one has yet ... found a way that you can keep using the same oil forever.

I was so obsessed by this problem that I was thinking about it all the time - when I woke up in the morning, when I went to sleep at night - and that went on for eight years.

It's fine to work on any problem, so long as it generates interesting mathematics along the way - even if you don't solve it at the end of the day.

There are proofs that date back to the Greeks that are still valid today.

I loved doing problems in school.

But the best problem I ever found, I found in my local public library.

That particular odyssey is now over. My mind is now at rest.

I really believed that I was on the right track, but that did not mean that I would necessarily reach my goal

The only way I could relax was when I was with my children.