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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.

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
Doe
Create
Mathematics
Contemplative
Matter
Happen
Subject
Consolation
Great
Creative
Case
Mathematician
Much
Rather
Soon
Bother
Would
Desire
Subjects
Draw
Lost
Deal
Pity
Happens
Deals
Silly
Power
Cases
Draws
Anyhow

More quotes by G. H. Hardy

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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
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Exposition, criticism, appreciation, is work for second-rate minds.
G. H. Hardy
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I was at my best at a little past forty, when I was a professor at Oxford.
G. H. Hardy
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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.
G. H. Hardy
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The public does not need to be convinced that there is something in mathematics.
G. H. Hardy
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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
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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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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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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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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
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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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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
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A chess problem is simply an exercise in pure mathematics.
G. H. Hardy
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A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns.
G. H. Hardy
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Chess problems are the hymn-tunes of mathematics.
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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I do not know an instance of a major mathematical advance initiated by a man past fifty
G. H. Hardy
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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
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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