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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.