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

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

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.

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

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.

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.