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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.

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
Morning
Night
Problem
Years
Woke
Time
Obsessed
Thinking
Eight
Went
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More quotes by Andrew Wiles

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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.
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The only way I could relax was when I was with my children.
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That particular odyssey is now over. My mind is now at rest.
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I loved doing problems in school.
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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 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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But the best problem I ever found, I found in my local public library.
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Pure mathematicians just love to try unsolved problems - they love a challenge.
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The greatest problem for mathematicians now is probably the Riemann Hypothesis.
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However impenetrable it seems, if you don't try it, then you can never do it.
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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.
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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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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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I grew up in Cambridge in England, and my love of mathematics dates from those early childhood days.
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Fermat said he had a proof.
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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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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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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.
Andrew Wiles
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I had this rare privilege of being able to pursue in my adult life, what had been my childhood dream.
Andrew Wiles