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A chess problem is simply an exercise in pure mathematics.

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
Mathematics
Exercise
Pure
Simply
Problem
Chess

More quotes by G. H. Hardy

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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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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.
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Young men should prove theorems, old men should write books.
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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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The case for my life... is this: that I have added something to knowledge, and helped others to add more
G. H. Hardy
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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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Chess problems are the hymn-tunes of mathematics.
G. H. Hardy
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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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The seriousness of a mathematical theorem lies, not in its practical consequences, which are usually negligible, but in the significance of the mathematical ideas which it connects.
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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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Bombs are probably more merciful than bayonets
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Good work is not done by 'humble' men
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A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns.
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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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The study of mathematics is, if an unprofitable, a perfectly harmless and innocent occupation.
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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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Most people can do nothing at all well
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Archimedes will be remembered when Aeschylus is forgotten, because languages die and mathematical ideas do not. Immortality may be a silly word, but probably a mathematician has the best chance of whatever it may mean.
G. H. Hardy
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The public does not need to be convinced that there is something in mathematics.
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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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