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

Always try the problem that matters most to you.

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

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's no reason why these problems shouldn't be easy, and yet they turn out to be extremely intricate. Fermat's Last Theorem is the most beautiful example of this.

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

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

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.