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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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Bombs are probably more merciful than bayonets
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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.
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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
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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.
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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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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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Exposition, criticism, appreciation, is work for second-rate minds.
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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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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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Asked if he believes in one G-d, a mathematician answered: Yes, up to isomorphism.
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The mathematician's patterns, like the painter's or the poet's, must be beautiful.
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Young men should prove theorems, old men should write books.
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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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I was at my best at a little past forty, when I was a professor at Oxford.
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Most people can do nothing at all well
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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.
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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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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.
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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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