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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.

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
Believe
Prove
Observation
Theorems
Outside
Mathematical
Observations
Creation
Math
Describing
Simply
Discover
Observing
Belief
Notes
Mathematician
Lying
Mathematics
Observe
Science
Function
Proven
Reality
Lies
Describe
Creations

More quotes by G. H. Hardy

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I wrote a great deal during the next ten [early] years,but very little of any importance there are not more than four or five papers which I can still remember with some satisfaction.
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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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Asked if he believes in one G-d, a mathematician answered: Yes, up to isomorphism.
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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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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.
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... Philosophy proper is a subject, on the one hand so hopelessly obscure, on the other so astonishingly elementary, that there knowledge hardly counts.
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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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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.
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It is not worth an intelligent man's time to be in the majority. By definition, there are already enough people to do that.
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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.
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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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The study of mathematics is, if an unprofitable, a perfectly harmless and innocent occupation.
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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.
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The public does not need to be convinced that there is something in mathematics.
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Chess problems are the hymn-tunes of mathematics.
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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.
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The mathematician's patterns, like the painter's or the poet's, must be beautiful.
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A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns.
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A chess problem is simply an exercise in pure mathematics.
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Sometimes one has to say difficult things, but one ought to say them as simply as one knows how.
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