Andrew Wiles

“The only way I could relax was when I was with my children.”

“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.”

“There are proofs that date back to the Greeks that are still valid today.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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 thinking about.”

“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.”

“That particular odyssey is now over. My mind is now at rest.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“I grew up in Cambridge in England, and my love of mathematics dates from those early childhood days.”