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
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.
science oil forever
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.
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.
beautiful simple years
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.
love childhood england
I grew up in Cambridge in England, and my love of mathematics dates from those early childhood days.
problem hypothesis mathematician
The greatest problem for mathematicians now is probably the Riemann Hypothesis.
trying ifs seems
However impenetrable it seems, if you don't try it, then you can never do it.
use computer mathematical
I never use a computer.
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...
proof said
Fermat said he had a proof.
definitions problem mathematics
The definition of a good mathematical problem is the mathematics it generates rather than the problem itself.