Andrew Wiles Quotes & Sayings

“I loved doing problems in school. I'd take them home and make up new ones of my own. But the best problem I ever found, I found in my local public library. I was just browsing through the section of math books and I found this one book, which was all about one particular problem - Fermat's Last Theorem.”

“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.”

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

“Well, some mathematics problems look simple, and you try them for a year or so, and then you try them for a hundred years, and it turns out that they're extremely hard to solve.”

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

“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.”

“Always try the problem that matters most to you.”

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

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

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