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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 are no solutions up to infinity.

Andrew Wiles

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Andrew Wiles
Age: 71
Born: 1953
Born: April 11
Mathematician
University Teacher
Sir Andrew John Wiles
Andrew John Wiles
Andrew J. Wiles
Dr. Andrew Wiles
Prof. Sir Andrew Wiles FRS
Really
Billion
Billions
Satisfied
Solutions
Million
Aren
Mathematicians
Millions
Mathematician
Four
Infinity

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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.
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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 never use a computer.
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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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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.
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I really believed that I was on the right track, but that did not mean that I would necessarily reach my goal
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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.
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Always try the problem that matters most to you.
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I know it's a rare privilege, but if one can really tackle something in adult life that means that much to you, then it's more rewarding than anything I can imagine.
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I grew up in Cambridge in England, and my love of mathematics dates from those early childhood days.
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I loved doing problems in school.
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That particular odyssey is now over. My mind is now at rest.
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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 they're extremely hard to solve. There's no reason why these problems shouldn't be easy, and yet they turn out to be extremely intricate. Fermat's Last Theorem is the most beautiful example of this.
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I carried this problem around in my head basically the whole time. I would wake up with it first thing in the morning, I would be thinking about it all day, and I would be thinking about it when I went to sleep. Without distraction I would have the same thing going round and round in my mind.
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Mathematics... is a bit like discovering oil. ... But mathematics has one great advantage over oil, in that no one has yet ... found a way that you can keep using the same oil forever.
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Fermat said he had a proof.
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Just because we can't find a solution it doesn't mean that there isn't one.
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The only way I could relax was when I was with my children.
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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.
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Pure mathematicians just love to try unsolved problems - they love a challenge.
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