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

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The mathematician's patterns, like the painter's or the poet's, must be beautiful.
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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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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.
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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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Chess problems are the hymn-tunes of mathematics.
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Asked if he believes in one G-d, a mathematician answered: Yes, up to isomorphism.
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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.
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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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A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns.
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I propose to put forward an apology for mathematics and I may be told that it needs none, since there are now few studies more generally recognized, for good reasons or bad, as profitable and praiseworthy.
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In [great mathematics] there is a very high degree of unexpectedness, combined with inevitability and economy.
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The public does not need to be convinced that there is something in mathematics.
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Bombs are probably more merciful than bayonets
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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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All analysts spend half their time hunting through the literature for inequalities which they want to use and cannot prove.
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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.
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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.
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Exposition, criticism, appreciation, is work for second-rate minds.
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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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Cricket is the only game where you are playing against eleven of the other side and ten of your own.
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