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31 quotes by Andrew Wiles

Sir Andrew John Wiles, KBE, FRS (born 11 April 1953) is a British mathematician and a Royal Society Research Professor at the University of Oxford, specialising in number theory. He is most notable for proving Fermat's Last Theorem.
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The definition of a good mathematical problem is the mathematics it generates rather than the problem itself.

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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... →

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

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

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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... →

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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... →

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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... →

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Always try the problem that matters most to you.

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

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

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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... →

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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... →

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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... →

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