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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
Night
Problem
Years
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Obsessed
Thinking
Eight
Went
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Morning

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I had this rare privilege of being able to pursue in my adult life, what had been my childhood dream.
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I loved doing problems in school.
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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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There are proofs that date back to the Greeks that are still valid today.
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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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Just because we can't find a solution it doesn't mean that there isn't one.
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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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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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Always try the problem that matters most to you.
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I never use a computer.
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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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Pure mathematicians just love to try unsolved problems - they love a challenge.
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But the best problem I ever found, I found in my local public library.
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The greatest problem for mathematicians now is probably the Riemann Hypothesis.
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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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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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However impenetrable it seems, if you don't try it, then you can never do it.
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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 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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