Andrew Wiles Quotes

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.

Mathematicians aren't motivated by money and material gain, or even by practical applications of their work. For us it's the glory of solving one of the great unsolved problems that have outwitted previous generations of mathematicians. …. Despite all the things we've discovered over the last 7 millennia, there are still many things we don't understand.

Mathematical discoveries, small or great are never born of spontaneous generation.

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.

A lot of the math that I do, it's not sort of premeditated. I talk online or with a colleague, and I get interested, and I just follow where it leads.

The true spirit of delight...is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry.

Mathematics is not a contemplative but a creative subject.

There is no study in the world which brings into more harmonious action all the faculties of the mind than [mathematics], ... or, like this, seems to raise them, by successive steps of initiation, to higher and higher states of conscious intellectual being.

Yes, but with the Cube there are many flashes, there are many aha's.

Even the greatest mathematicians, the ones that we would put into our mythology of great mathematicians, had to do a great deal of leg work in order to get to the solution in the end.

Mathematics are the result of mysterious powers which no one understands, and which the unconscious recognition of beauty must play an important part. Out of an infinity of designs a mathematician chooses one pattern for beauty's sake and pulls it down to earth.

I am interested in mathematics only as a creative art.

It's such a diversion to be constantly thinking of better ways I can teach people math that my hunger is for that really, for new ways of translating the beauty of it.

Thinking - in particular abstract thinking, which most of us are introduced to through the study of mathematics and literature - helps us learn that we can become problem solvers.

I found maths very easy, but I still enjoyed discovering things. You have to have the necessary information. For example, what's the difference between the mean and the median? Probability fascinated me. You have to think very carefully about things, which is the way my mind works anyway.

I hope that seeing the excitement of solving this problem will make young mathematicians realize that there are lots and lots of other problems in mathematics which are going to be just as challenging in the future.

Mathematics seems to endow one with something like a new sense.

The essence of mathematics lies precisely in its freedom.

What is mathematics? It is only a systematic effort of solving puzzles posed by nature.

It's got to be the best intellectual exercise out there. You're seeing through new situations every ten minutes. In the stock market you don't base your decisions on what the market is doing, but on what you think is rational. Bridge is about weighing gain/loss ratios. You're doing calculations all the time.

The math helps you have better understanding and helps you have more creative ideas, but you can't replace the creative ideas

A great deal of my work is just playing with equations and seeing what they give.

The pursuit of mathematics is a divine madness of the human spirit.

Chess problems are the hymn-tunes of mathematics.

... mathematics is the science of skillful operations with concepts and rules invented just for this purpose.