Quotes from Andrew Wiles

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

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.

Always try the problem that matters most to you.

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

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.

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

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.

I hope that seeing the excitement of solving this problem will make young mathematicians realize that there are lots and lots of other problems in mathematics which are going to be just as challenging in the future.

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.

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.

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

Fermat said he had a proof.

But the best problem I ever found, I found in my local public library.

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.

I loved doing problems in school. I'd take them home and make up new ones of my own. But the best problem I ever found, I found in my local public library. I was just browsing through the section of math books and I found this one book, which was all about one particular problem - Fermat's Last Theorem.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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