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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
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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
Clever
Fellows
Ancient
College
Boys
Greeks
Another
Scholarship
School
Candidates
Greek
More quotes by 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
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
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
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.
G. H. Hardy
Most people can do nothing at all well
G. H. Hardy
The study of mathematics is, if an unprofitable, a perfectly harmless and innocent occupation.
G. H. Hardy
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.
G. H. Hardy
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'.
G. H. Hardy
No mathematician should ever allow himself to forget that mathematics, more than any other art or science, is a young man's game
G. H. Hardy
The public does not need to be convinced that there is something in mathematics.
G. H. Hardy
I was at my best at a little past forty, when I was a professor at Oxford.
G. H. Hardy
Good work is not done by 'humble' men
G. H. Hardy
It is not worth an intelligent man's time to be in the majority. By definition, there are already enough people to do that.
G. H. Hardy
I do not know an instance of a major mathematical advance initiated by a man past fifty
G. H. Hardy
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
Young men should prove theorems, old men should write books.
G. H. Hardy
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
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
Perhaps five or even ten per cent of men can do something rather well. It is a tiny minority who can do anything really well, and the number of men who can do two things well is negligible. If a man has any genuine talent, he should be ready to make almost any sacrifice in order to cultivate it to the full.
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
