Andrew Wiles quotes - page 2

I loved doing problems in school. I'd take them home and make up new ones of my own. (Andrew Wiles)

Fermat was my childhood passion.

Andrew Wiles

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.

Andrew Wiles

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.

Andrew Wiles

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.

Andrew Wiles

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.

Andrew Wiles

But what has made this problem special for amateurs is that there's a tiny possibility that there does exist an elegant 17th-century proof.

Andrew Wiles

But perhaps that's always the way with math problems, and we just have to find new ones to capture our attention.

Andrew Wiles

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.

Andrew Wiles

I loved doing problems in school.

Andrew Wiles

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. (Andrew Wiles)

I'm sure that some of them will be very hard and I'll have a sense of achievement again, but nothing will mean the same to me - there's no other problem in mathematics that could hold me the way that this one did.

Andrew Wiles

It could be that the methods needed to take the next step may simply be beyond present day mathematics. Perhaps the methods I needed to complete the proof would not be invented for a hundred years.

Andrew Wiles

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.

Andrew Wiles

Previous
1
2 (Current)
Next

Andrew Wiles

Andrew Wiles - Image

Occupation: English Mathematician
Born: April 11, 1953
Quotes count: 39
Wikipedia: Andrew Wiles

Related authors

Pierre de Fermat 11

French Mathematician

Grigori Perelman 3

Russian Mathematician

Simon Singh 4

British Author

Terence Tao 2

Australian Mathematician

Niels Henrik Abel 4

Mathematician

Pythagoras 142

Greek Mathematician

James Woods 28

American Actor

Barry Mazur 4

American Mathematician

Paul Allen 32

American Businessman

Jean-Pierre Serre 2

Mathematician