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Greek mathematics is the real thing. The Greeks first spoke a language which modern mathematicians can understand... So Greek mathematics is 'permanent', more permanent even than Greek literature.
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
Firsts
Permanent
First
Mathematics
Real
Modern
Mathematicians
Even
Literature
Greeks
Thing
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Language
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Greek
More quotes by G. H. Hardy
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.
G. H. Hardy
The study of mathematics is, if an unprofitable, a perfectly harmless and innocent occupation.
G. H. Hardy
Sometimes one has to say difficult things, but one ought to say them as simply as one knows how.
G. H. Hardy
If I could prove by logic that you would die in five minutes, I should be sorry you were going to die, but my sorrow would be very much mitigated by pleasure in the proof.
G. H. Hardy
No one has yet discovered any warlike purpose to be served by the theory of numbers or relativity, and it seems unlikely that anyone will do so for many years.
G. H. Hardy
I do not know an instance of a major mathematical advance initiated by a man past fifty
G. H. Hardy
In [great mathematics] there is a very high degree of unexpectedness, combined with inevitability and economy.
G. H. Hardy
As Littlewood said to me once [of the ancient Greeks], they are not clever school boys or scholarship candidates, but Fellows of another college.
G. H. Hardy
Most people can do nothing at all well
G. H. Hardy
Mathematics is not a contemplative but a creative subject no one can draw much consolation from it when he has lost the power or the desire to create and that is apt to happen to a mathematician rather soon. It is a pity, but in that case he does not matter a great deal anyhow, and it would be silly to bother about him.
G. H. Hardy
All analysts spend half their time hunting through the literature for inequalities which they want to use and cannot prove.
G. H. Hardy
317 is a prime, not because we think so, or because our minds are shaped in one way rather than another, but because it is so, because mathematical reality is built that way.
G. H. Hardy
For my part, it is difficult for me to say what I owe to Ramanujan - his originality has been a constant source of suggestion to me ever since I knew him, and his death is one of the worst blows I have ever had.
G. H. Hardy
Bradman is a whole class above any batsman who has ever lived: if Archimedes, Newton and Gauss remain in the Hobbs class, I have to admit the possibility of a class above them, which I find difficult to imagine. They had better be moved from now on into the Bradman class.
G. H. Hardy
Cricket is the only game where you are playing against eleven of the other side and ten of your own.
G. H. Hardy
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.
G. H. Hardy
I was at my best at a little past forty, when I was a professor at Oxford.
G. H. Hardy
The public does not need to be convinced that there is something in mathematics.
G. H. Hardy
What we do may be small, but it has a certain character of permanence and to have produced anything of the slightest permanent interest, whether it be a copy of verses or a geometrical theorem, is to have done something utterly beyond the powers of the vast majority of men.
G. H. Hardy
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.
G. H. Hardy