Andrew Wiles Quotes

I didn't invent forensic science and medicine. I just was one of the first people to recognize how interesting it is.

Mathematical discoveries, small or great are never born of spontaneous generation.

There is some truth to the idea that, in the fields of science, individual contributions of great significance are possible.

It could be that the methods needed to take the next step may simply be beyond present day mathematics. Perhaps the methods I needed to complete the proof would not be invented for a hundred years.

Sometimes I have compared myself with a scientist or something: when you discover something and you don't expect the whole world to understand it. I always thought I was doing that kind of activity, in art and in music too.

Science reserves the highest reward for those of you who disprove our most cherished beliefs. At any moment someone from any walk of life could come forward and be responsible for a complete revision of our view of everything.

The images of his infinite pasts and infinite futures washed over him as he waited, paralyzed, in the present.

The pioneer scientist must have "a vivid intuitive imagination, for new ideas are not generated by deduction, but by artistically creative imagination."

It was probably 10 at night when I started to read Donnie Darko. I get in bed and read the first page, and I go, "Hmmm. That's interesting." Second page, "Wow." By the fourth page, my heart started to beat, and I knew. It makes me cry, because I knew I had found a classic film. You just know when you get certain material.

Upon arriving in the capital-F Future, we discover it, invariably, to be the lower-case now.

In all times it is only individuals that have advanced science, not the age.

Don't Time travel into the past. You can't change it. Today it starts all over again. Every tomorrow is determined by every day.

About Thomas Hobbes: He was 40 years old before he looked on geometry; which happened accidentally. Being in a gentleman's library, Euclid's Elements lay open, and "twas the 47 El. libri I" [Pythagoras' Theorem]. He read the proposition "By God", sayd he, "this is impossible:" So he reads the demonstration of it, which referred him back to such a proposition; which proposition he read. That referred him back to another, which he also read. Et sic deinceps, that at last he was demonstratively convinced of that truth. This made him in love with geometry.

The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.

In some subsequent episodes, certain individuals have certain knowledge of certain events that they wouldn't have, if they didn't have access to the future.

If I have the chance to time travel, might as well go all out.

The Doctor: Don't blink. Don't even blink. Blink and you're dead. Don't turn your back. Don't look away. And don't blink.

With an absurd oversimplification, the "invention" of calculus [method in mathematics] is sometimes ascribed to two men, Newton and Leibniz.

All great scientists have, in a certain sense, been great artists; the man with no imagination may collect facts, but he cannot make great discoveries.

If I would do another 'Terminator' movie I would have Terminator travel back in time and tell Arnold not to have a special election.

Time travel, by its very nature, was invented in all periods of history simultaneously.

With an absurd oversimplification, the 'invention' of the calculus is sometimes ascribed to two men, Newton and Leibniz. In reality, the calculus is the product of a long evolution that was neither initiated nor terminated by Newton and Leibniz, but in which both played a decisive part.

I am persuaded that this method [for calculating the volume of a sphere] will be of no little service to mathematics. For I foresee that once it is understood and established, it will be used to discover other theorems which have not yet occurred to me, by other mathematicians, now living or yet unborn.

At every stage of understanding the universe better, the benefits to civilisation have been immeasurable. None of those big leaps were made with us knowing what was going to happen.

Creativity in science could be described as the act of putting two and two together to make five