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A science is said to be useful if its development tends to accentuate the existing inequalities in the distribution of wealth, or more directly promotes the destruction of human life.

G. H. Hardy

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G. H. Hardy
Age: 70 †
Born: 1877
Born: February 7
Died: 1947
Died: December 1
Academic
Mathematician
University Teacher
Cranleigh
Surrey
G. H. Hardy
Godfrey Harold Hardy
Godfrey·Harold·Hardy
Godfrey Harold
Existence
Tends
Science
Inequality
Directly
Human
Useful
Inequalities
Humans
Accounts
Accentuate
Life
Destruction
Promotes
Development
Distribution
Wealth
Existing

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The study of mathematics is, if an unprofitable, a perfectly harmless and innocent occupation.
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The mathematician is in much more direct contact with reality. ... [Whereas] the physicist's reality, whatever it may be, has few or none of the attributes which common sense ascribes instinctively to reality. A chair may be a collection of whirling electrons.
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Most people can do nothing at all well
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I count Maxwell and Einstein, Eddington and Dirac, among real mathematicians. The great modern achievements of applied mathematics have been in relativity and quantum mechanics, and these subjects are at present at any rate, almost as useless as the theory of numbers.
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Young men should prove theorems, old men should write books.
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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.
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There is always more in one of Ramanujan's formulae than meets the eye, as anyone who sets to work to verify those which look the easiest will soon discover. In some the interest lies very deep, in others comparatively near the surface but there is not one which is not curious and entertaining.
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I believe that mathematical reality lies outside us, that our function is to discover or observe it, and that the theorems which we prove, and which we describe grandiloquently as our creations, are simply the notes of our observations.
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I was at my best at a little past forty, when I was a professor at Oxford.
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It is hardly possible to maintain seriously that the evil done by science is not altogether outweighed by the good. For example, if ten million lives were lost in every war, the net effect of science would still have been to increase the average length of life.
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All analysts spend half their time hunting through the literature for inequalities which they want to use and cannot prove.
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I do not know an instance of a major mathematical advance initiated by a man past fifty
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The seriousness of a mathematical theorem lies, not in its practical consequences, which are usually negligible, but in the significance of the mathematical ideas which it connects.
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Asked if he believes in one G-d, a mathematician answered: Yes, up to isomorphism.
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Cricket is the only game where you are playing against eleven of the other side and ten of your own.
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In [great mathematics] there is a very high degree of unexpectedness, combined with inevitability and economy.
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A chess problem is simply an exercise in pure mathematics.
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A month's intelligent instruction in the theory of numbes ought to be twice as instructive, twice as useful, and at least 10 times as entertaining as the same amount of 'calculus for engineers'.
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The public does not need to be convinced that there is something in mathematics.
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No mathematician should ever allow himself to forget that mathematics, more than any other art or science, is a young man's game
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