English - Mathematician | April 11, 1953 -
There are proofs that date back to the Greeks that are still valid today.
Andrew Wiles
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However impenetrable it seems, if you don't try it, then you can never do it.
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There's also a sense of freedom. I was so obsessed by this problem that I was thinking about if all the time - when I woke up in the morning, when I went to sleep at night, and that went on for eight years.
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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.
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But the best problem I ever found, I found in my local public library.
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Fermat said he had a proof.
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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.
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I realized that anything to do with Fermat's Last Theorem generates too much interest.
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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.
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I really believed that I was on the right track, but that did not mean that I would necessarily reach my goal.
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I don't believe Fermat had a proof. I think he fooled himself into thinking he had a proof.
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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.
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