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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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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
Minutes
Pleasure
Mitigated
Five
Proof
Dies
Logic
Going
Mathematics
Much
Sorry
Would
Sorrow
Prove

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The public does not need to be convinced that there is something in mathematics.
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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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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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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.
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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.
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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'.
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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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The case for my life... is this: that I have added something to knowledge, and helped others to add more
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Good work is not done by 'humble' men
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Chess problems are the hymn-tunes of mathematics.
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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.
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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.
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The study of mathematics is, if an unprofitable, a perfectly harmless and innocent occupation.
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Asked if he believes in one G-d, a mathematician answered: Yes, up to isomorphism.
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A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns.
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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 mathematician's patterns, like the painter's or the poet's, must be beautiful.
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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.
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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.
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Exposition, criticism, appreciation, is work for second-rate minds.
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