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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.

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
Way
Word
Increases
Men
Happiness
Useful
Science
Using
Art
Material
May
Increase
Indirectly
Wells
Materials
Promotes
Well
Comfort
Crude
Even
Development
Commonplace

More quotes by 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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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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The case for my life... is this: that I have added something to knowledge, and helped others to add more
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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.
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The mathematician's patterns, like the painter's or the poet's, must be beautiful.
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The study of mathematics is, if an unprofitable, a perfectly harmless and innocent occupation.
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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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I do not know an instance of a major mathematical advance initiated by a man past fifty
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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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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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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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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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Sometimes one has to say difficult things, but one ought to say them as simply as one knows how.
G. H. Hardy
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Pure mathematics is on the whole distinctly more useful than applied... For what is useful above all is technique, and mathematical technique is taught mainly through pure mathematics.
G. H. Hardy
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Most people can do nothing at all well
G. H. Hardy
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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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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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A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns.
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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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Chess problems are the hymn-tunes of mathematics.
G. H. Hardy