Andrew Wiles
Andrew Wiles
Sir Andrew John Wiles KBE FRSis a British mathematician and a Royal Society Research Professor at the University of Oxford, specialising in number theory. He is most notable for proving Fermat's Last Theorem, for which he received the 2016 Abel Prize. Wiles has received numerous other honours...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionMathematician
Date of Birth11 April 1953
thinking understanding problem
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.
school problem problems-in-school
I loved doing problems in school.
library problem found
But the best problem I ever found, I found in my local public library.
problem hypothesis mathematician
The greatest problem for mathematicians now is probably the Riemann Hypothesis.
definitions problem mathematics
The definition of a good mathematical problem is the mathematics it generates rather than the problem itself.
challenges trying problem
Pure mathematicians just love to try unsolved problems - they love a challenge.
trying matter problem
Always try the problem that matters most to you.
eight english-mathematician obsessed problem sleep thinking time woke
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.
best books found home last local loved math particular problems public section
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.
english-mathematician knew moment solve ten understand year
Here was a problem, that I, a ten year old, could understand and I knew from that moment that I would never let it go. I had to solve it.
achievement english-mathematician hard mathematics sure
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.
mean solutions
Just because we can't find a solution it doesn't mean that there isn't one.
work interesting long
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.
math long attention
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.