Andrew Wiles Quotes

Well, 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 are many people who want simple solutions, but there are none ... nor will there be.

I suppose you are two fathoms deep in mathematics, and if you are, then God help you. For so am I, only with this difference: I stick fast in the mud at the bottom, and there I shall remain.

Mathematics is not yet ready for such problems.

Don't tell me this is a difficult problem. If it weren't difficult, it wouldn't be a problem.

Every solution breeds new problems.

New York is an exciting town where something is happening all the time, most unsolved.

I'm interested in complexity, in the mathematical sense, as well as the idiomatic sense. The idea of emergence - that it's possible for complex patterns to arise out of many simple interactions - is fascinating.

In mathematics we have long since drawn the rein, and given over a hopeless race.

People relate to things that feel real to them. All the good, happy, over-sexed and moneyed endings on TV are not the way most of us feel in our lives. The success of 'E.R.,' I think, is not relying on overly sentimental stories that are solved where people's lives wrap up nicely with happy endings.

That's my favorite kind of television, where it's not wrapped up in a pretty little bow. It's like life. You deal with one thing in your life, 500 others rear their head.

It could be that the methods needed to take the next step may simply be beyond present day mathematics. Perhaps the methods I needed to complete the proof would not be invented for a hundred years.

We academics - I am an academic - we love complexity. You can write papers about complexity, and the nice thing about complexity is it's fundamentally intractable in many ways, so you're not responsible for outcomes.

There is no complete theory of anything.

There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know.

Not all the vital questions have been settled.

If answers to our national problems were [readily] available we would not have to spend all our time talking about them.

The remedies are neither easy, nor cheap, nor immediately realizable.

The thorniest problems are never technological.

It is very true that I threw up my cap for liberty with great ardor, and perfect sincerity, but very soon found the folly of it. A hundred years to come my people will not be fit for liberty. They do not know what it is, unenlightened as they are, and under the influence of a Catholic clergy, a despotism is the proper government for them, but there is no reason why it should not be a wise and virtuous one.

It is impossible to foresee or define the extent and variety of national exigencies.

One generation's reform becomes the next generation's problem.

There will always be days when we have to race to catch up to events we did not foresee, not because somebody is asleep at the switch, but because what’s going on is so complicated.

No easy problems ever come to the President. If they are easy to solve, somebody else has solved them.

Sometimes, it feels artificial to try to come up with a solution to something that none of us know how to solve.