Andrew Wiles Quotes

35 quotes in 432 categories

• The definition of a good mathematical problem is the mathematics it generates rather than the problem itself.
• 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…
• I really believed that I was on the right track, but that did not mean that I would necessarily reach my goal
• However impenetrable it seems, if you don't try it, then you can never do it.
• Always try the problem that matters most to you.
• Just because we can't find a solution it doesn't mean that there isn't one.
• Perhaps I could best describe my experience of doing mathematics in terms of entering a dark mansion. You go into the first room and it's…
• I never use a computer.
• 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…
• I was so obsessed by this problem that I was thinking about it all the time - when I woke up in the morning, when…
• That particular odyssey is now over. My mind is now at rest.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• But the best problem I ever found, I found in my local public library.
• Fermat said he had a proof.
• I loved doing problems in school.
• The only way I could relax was when I was with my children.
• There are proofs that date back to the Greeks that are still valid today.

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