I realized that anything to do with Fermat's Last Theorem generates too much interest.

I know it's a rare privilege, but if one can really tackle something in adult life that means that much to you, then it's more rewarding than anything I can imagine.

That particular odyssey is now over. My mind is now at rest.

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.

However impenetrable it seems, if you don't try it, then you can never do it.

Fermat said he had a proof.

Mathematicians aren't satisfied because they know there are no solutions up to four million or four billion, they really want to know that there are no solutions up to infinity.

Always try the problem that matters most to you.

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.

Pure mathematicians just love to try unsolved problems - they love a challenge.

The greatest problem for mathematicians now is probably the Riemann Hypothesis.

Perhaps the methods I needed to complete the proof would not be invented for a hundred years. So even if I was on the right track, I could be living in the wrong century.

I'm sure that some of them will be very hard and I'll have a sense of achievement again, but nothing will mean the same to me - there's no other problem in mathematics that could hold me the way that this one did.

I grew up in Cambridge in England, and my love of mathematics dates from those early childhood days.

I had this rare privilege of being able to pursue in my adult life, what had been my childhood dream.

I realized that anything to do with Fermat's Last Theorem generates too much interest.

The only way I could relax was when I was with my children.

The definition of a good mathematical problem is the mathematics it generates rather than the problem itself.

I don't believe Fermat had a proof. I think he fooled himself into thinking he had a proof.

But the best problem I ever found, I found in my local public library.

Just because we can't find a solution it doesn't mean that there isn't one.

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.

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.

I really believed that I was on the right track, but that did not mean that I would necessarily reach my goal.

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.

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.

I loved doing problems in school.

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.

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.

There are proofs that date back to the Greeks that are still valid today.

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.

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.

Pure mathematician just love to try unsolved problems they love a challenge.

I don't like being recognised, I have no interest in being famous at all, I just do what I do. If I could be like Captain Kirk and beam myself up and then beam myself down, I would!

Judaism has always been a strong interest of mine. My two sons speak Hebrew and are familiar with the scriptures and with rabbinic literature. This is the way we live.

It is the interest one takes in books that makes a library. And if a library have interest it is; if not, it isn't.

I'm thinking of going to programming school. Learn how to sit down at any computer and learn to do anything on it. That's all I have left and have interest in.

I don't have a strong interest in history.

I'm not up on today's television for children, because it's mostly cartoons that don't seem to interest me.

It was clear that the special interest groups in California really wanted the Chinese to be shut out of the country, because that was where the racial tension was the greatest.

I think that the quality of all bands is steadily improving and it is a pleasant thought to me that perhaps the efforts of Sousa's Band have quickened that interest and improved that quality.

Warren Beatty took an interest in my career at one point.

Neither these statesmen nor their constituents sought in any way to use the Government for the interest of themselves or their section, or for the injury of a single member of the Confederacy.

I had given up the guitar between '75 and '78. I completely lost interest. I was sick of hearing other guitar players and I was tired of my tunes.

The government must do all it can to help reduce interest rates for business.

I went to the Academy and studied with Stuck who was then a big man. But didn't interest me. I didn't know that before me there was Kandinsky and Klee who had also studied with Stuck. He had a good name at that time.

I have no interest in sailing around the world. Not that there is any lack of requests for me to do so.

Pakistan has made no mention of ending our tests. We have a missile program, and it is in the national interest whatever we want to do.

A government for the people must depend for its success on the intelligence, the morality, the justice, and the interest of the people themselves.