Andrew Wiles Quotes & Sayings (Page 2)

“We've lost something that's been with us for so long, and something that drew a lot of us into mathematics. But perhaps that's always the way with math problems, and we just have to find new ones to capture our attention.”

“I realized that anything to do with Fermat's Last Theorem generates too much interest.”

“I don't believe Fermat had a proof. I think he fooled himself into thinking he had a proof.”

“Perhaps the methods I needed to complete the proof would not be invented for a hundred years. So even if I was on the right track, I could be living in the wrong century.”

“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. There's no reason why these problems shouldn't be easy, and yet they turn out to be extremely intricate.”

“There's also a sense of freedom. I was so obsessed by this problem that I was thinking about if all the time - when I woke up in the morning, when I went to sleep at night, and that went on for eight years.”

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

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

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

“Fermat said he had a proof.”