Andrew Wiles Quotes

• 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

• 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.

  Andrew Wiles

• 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.

  Andrew Wiles

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

  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

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

  Andrew Wiles

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

  Andrew Wiles

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

  Andrew Wiles

• That particular odyssey is now over. My mind is now at rest.

  Andrew Wiles

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

  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

• 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

• Just because we can’t find a solution it doesn’t mean that there isn’t one.

  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

• 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

• 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

• 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 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.

  Andrew Wiles

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

  Andrew Wiles

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

  Andrew Wiles

Andrew Wiles (30)

Birth:	11th April, 1953
Nationality:	British
Profession:	Mathematician, Professor

About

Sir Andrew John Wiles is a British mathematician and a Royal Society Research Professor at the University of Oxford, specializing in number theory. He is most notable for proving Fermat's Last Theorem. Wiles earned his bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1974 after his study at Merton College, Oxford, and a Ph.D. in 1980, after his research at Clare College, Cambridge. After a stay at the Institute for Advanced Study in New Jersey in 1981, Wiles became a professor at Princeton University.  In 1985–86, Wiles was a Guggenheim Fellow at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques near Paris and at the École Normale Supérieure. From 1988 to 1990, Wiles was a Royal Society Research Professor at the University of Oxford, and then he returned to Princeton. He rejoined Oxford in 2011 as Royal Society Research Professor.

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