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.

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.

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.

I had this rare privilege of being able to pursue in my adult life, what had been my childhood dream.

There are proofs that date back to the Greeks that are still valid today.

I really believed that I was on the right track, but that did not mean that I would necessarily reach my goal

I carried this problem around in my head basically the whole time. I would wake up with it first thing in the morning, I would be thinking about it all day, and I would be thinking about it when I went to sleep. Without distraction I would have the same thing going round and round in my mind.