Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by G. H. Hardy

Image
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
Image
The mathematician's patterns, like the painter's or the poet's, must be beautiful.
G. H. Hardy
Image
Sometimes one has to say difficult things, but one ought to say them as simply as one knows how.
G. H. Hardy
Image
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.
G. H. Hardy
Image
No mathematician should ever allow himself to forget that mathematics, more than any other art or science, is a young man's game
G. H. Hardy
Image
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
Image
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
Image
A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns.
G. H. Hardy
Image
Exposition, criticism, appreciation, is work for second-rate minds.
G. H. Hardy
Image
The case for my life... is this: that I have added something to knowledge, and helped others to add more
G. H. Hardy
Image
... 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
Image
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
Image
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.
G. H. Hardy
Image
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
Image
Bombs are probably more merciful than bayonets
G. H. Hardy
Image
Chess problems are the hymn-tunes of mathematics.
G. H. Hardy
Image
I do not know an instance of a major mathematical advance initiated by a man past fifty
G. H. Hardy
Image
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
Image
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.
G. H. Hardy
Image
I was at my best at a little past forty, when I was a professor at Oxford.
G. H. Hardy