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
children relax way
The only way I could relax was when I was with my children.
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.
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.
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.
mind odyssey particular
That particular odyssey is now over. My mind is now at rest.
school problem problems-in-school
I loved doing problems in school.
mean track goal
I really believed that I was on the right track, but that did not mean that I would necessarily reach my goal
library problem found
But the best problem I ever found, I found in my local public library.
morning sleep science
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.
greek today proof
There are proofs that date back to the Greeks that are still valid today.
morning sleep night
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.