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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.

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
Study
Studies
Since
Recognized
Science
Generally
May
Reasons
Reason
Mathematics
Praiseworthy
Needs
None
Propose
Good
Forward
Profitable
Told
Apology

More quotes by G. H. Hardy

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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 science is said to be useful if its development tends to accentuate the existing inequalities in the distribution of wealth, or more directly promotes the destruction of human life.
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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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All analysts spend half their time hunting through the literature for inequalities which they want to use and cannot prove.
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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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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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Exposition, criticism, appreciation, is work for second-rate minds.
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Young men should prove theorems, old men should write books.
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A man who sets out to justify his existence and his activities has to distinguish two different questions. The first is whether the work which he does is worth doing and the second is why he does it (whatever its value may be).
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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.
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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Cricket is the only game where you are playing against eleven of the other side and ten of your own.
G. H. Hardy
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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.
G. H. Hardy
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It is not worth an intelligent man's time to be in the majority. By definition, there are already enough people to do that.
G. H. Hardy
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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.
G. H. Hardy
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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.
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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The mathematician's patterns, like the painter's or the poet's, must be beautiful.
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