Andrew Wiles

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.