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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.

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
Mathematics
Pure
Distinctly
Taught
Sensual
Whole
Mainly
Applied
Mathematical
Useful
Technique

More quotes by G. H. Hardy

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A science or an art may be said to be useful if its development increases, even indirectly, the material well-being and comfort of men, it promotes happiness, using that word in a crude and commonplace way.
G. H. Hardy
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A mathematician ... has no material to work with but ideas, and so his patterns are likely to last longer, since ideas wear less with time than words.
G. H. Hardy
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A man who sets out to justify his existence and his activities has to distinguish two different questions. The first is whether the work which he does is worth doing and the second is why he does it (whatever its value may be).
G. H. Hardy
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Good work is not done by 'humble' men
G. H. Hardy
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Sometimes one has to say difficult things, but one ought to say them as simply as one knows how.
G. H. Hardy
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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.
G. H. Hardy
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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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I do not know an instance of a major mathematical advance initiated by a man past fifty
G. H. Hardy
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In [great mathematics] there is a very high degree of unexpectedness, combined with inevitability and economy.
G. H. Hardy
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Asked if he believes in one G-d, a mathematician answered: Yes, up to isomorphism.
G. H. Hardy
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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.
G. H. Hardy
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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.
G. H. Hardy
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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.
G. H. Hardy
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Bombs are probably more merciful than bayonets
G. H. Hardy
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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
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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.
G. H. Hardy
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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.
G. H. Hardy
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In these days of conflict between ancient and modern studies, there must surely be something to be said for a study which did not begin with Pythagoras, and will not end with Einstein, but is the oldest and the youngest of all.
G. H. Hardy
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The study of mathematics is, if an unprofitable, a perfectly harmless and innocent occupation.
G. H. Hardy
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A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns.
G. H. Hardy