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.

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

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

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.

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

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