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

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.

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

I loved doing problems in school. I'd take them home and make up new ones of my own. But the best problem I ever found, I found in my local public library. I was just browsing through the section of math books and I found this one book, which was all about one particular problem - Fermat's Last Theorem.

From the start, the problems has always been more of a managerial challenge than a technical challenge.

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