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
Andrew Wiles quotes about
use computer mathematical
I never use a computer.
trying ifs seems
However impenetrable it seems, if you don't try it, then you can never do it.
problem hypothesis mathematician
The greatest problem for mathematicians now is probably the Riemann Hypothesis.
proof said
Fermat said he had a proof.
dark light six-months
Perhaps I could best describe my experience of doing mathematics in terms of entering a dark mansion. You go into the first room and it's dark, completely dark. You stumble around, bumping into the furniture. Gradually, you learn where each piece of furniture is. And finally, after six months or so, you find the light switch and turn it on. Suddenly, it's all illuminated and you can see exactly where you were. Then you enter the next dark room...
college umpires people
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.
love childhood england
I grew up in Cambridge in England, and my love of mathematics dates from those early childhood days.
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.
greek today proof
There are proofs that date back to the Greeks that are still valid today.
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.
library problem found
But the best problem I ever found, I found in my local public library.
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.
mind odyssey particular
That particular odyssey is now over. My mind is now at rest.
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.