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All analysts spend half their time hunting through the literature for inequalities which they want to use and cannot prove.
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
Math
Prove
Spend
Literature
Half
Inequalities
Use
Analysts
Cannot
Hunting
Time
Inequality
More quotes by G. H. Hardy
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
The fact is there are few more popular subjects than mathematics. Most people have some appreciation of mathematics, just as most people can enjoy a pleasant tune.
G. H. Hardy
Exposition, criticism, appreciation, is work for second-rate minds.
G. H. Hardy
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.
G. H. Hardy
The study of mathematics is, if an unprofitable, a perfectly harmless and innocent occupation.
G. H. Hardy
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
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.
G. H. Hardy
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.
G. H. Hardy
I was at my best at a little past forty, when I was a professor at Oxford.
G. H. Hardy
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.
G. H. Hardy
I do not know an instance of a major mathematical advance initiated by a man past fifty
G. H. Hardy
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.
G. H. Hardy
The case for my life... is this: that I have added something to knowledge, and helped others to add more
G. H. Hardy
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
In [great mathematics] there is a very high degree of unexpectedness, combined with inevitability and economy.
G. H. Hardy
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.
G. H. Hardy
Chess problems are the hymn-tunes of mathematics.
G. H. Hardy
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
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
... 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
