G. H. Hardy
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G. H. Hardy (1877 – 1947)
British mathematician.
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Quotes
- Pure mathematics is on the whole distinctly more useful than applied. For what is useful above all is technique, and mathematical technique is taught mainly through pure mathematics.
- Young men should prove theorems, old men should write books.
- Quoted by Freeman Dyson
- Reductio ad absurdum, which Euclid loved so much, is one of a mathematician's finest weapons. It is a far finer gambit than any chess play: a chess player may offer the sacrifice of a pawn or even a piece, but a mathematician offers the game.
- A Mathematician's Apology (London 1941).
- There is no scorn more profound, or on the whole more justifiable, than that of the men who make for the men who explain. Exposition, criticism, appreciation, is work for second-rate minds.
- A Mathematician's Apology (London 1941).
- I am interested in mathematics only as a creative art.
- A Mathematician's Apology (London 1941).
- A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.
- A Mathematician's Apology (London 1941).
- Archimedes will be remembered when Aeschylus is forgotten, because languages die and mathematical ideas do not. "Immortality" may be a silly word, but probably a mathematician has the best chance of whatever it may mean.
- from A Mathematician's Apology
- No discovery of mine has made, or is likely to make, for good or ill, the least difference to the amenity of the world.
- "A Mathematician's Apology"
de:Godfrey Harold Hardy
