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A month's intelligent instruction in the theory of numbes ought to be twice as instructive, twice as useful, and at least 10 times as entertaining as the same amount of 'calculus for engineers'.

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
Months
Calculus
Theory
Engineers
Amount
Entertaining
Ought
Instruction
Least
Month
Times
Twice
Useful
Intelligent
Instructive

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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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The mathematician's patterns, like the painter's or the poet's, must be beautiful.
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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.
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The public does not need to be convinced that there is something in mathematics.
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Chess problems are the hymn-tunes of mathematics.
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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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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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Asked if he believes in one G-d, a mathematician answered: Yes, up to isomorphism.
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As Littlewood said to me once [of the ancient Greeks], they are not clever school boys or scholarship candidates, but Fellows of another college.
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Most people can do nothing at all well
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Young men should prove theorems, old men should write books.
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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.
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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.
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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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Bombs are probably more merciful than bayonets
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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.
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Exposition, criticism, appreciation, is work for second-rate minds.
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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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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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