G. H. Hardy Quotes
75 quotes
in 1090 categories
-
If intellectual curiosity, professional pride, and ambition are the dominant incentives to research, then assuredly no one has a fairer chance of gratifying them than…
Ambition
-
[Regarding mathematics,] there are now few studies more generally recognized, for good reasons or bad, as profitable and praiseworthy. This may be true; indeed it…
Astronomy
-
A chess problem is genuine mathematics, but it is in some way "trivial" mathematics. However, ingenious and intricate, however original and surprising the moves, there…
Ambiguous
-
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…
Accentuate
-
No discovery of mine has made, or is likely to make, directly or indirectly, for good or ill, the least difference to the amenity of…
Amenity
-
Archimedes will be remembered when Aeschylus is forgotten, because languages die and mathematical ideas do not. "Immortality" may be a silly word, but probably a…
Aeschylus
-
As history proves abundantly, mathematical achievement, whatever its intrinsic worth, is the most enduring of all.
Abundantly
-
Chess problems are the hymn-tunes of mathematics.
Chess
-
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…
First Spoke
-
I am interested in mathematics only as a creative art.
Art
-
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…
Believe
-
I have never done anything 'useful'. No discovery of mine has made, or is likely to make, directly or indirectly, for good or ill, the…
All
-
In [great mathematics] there is a very high degree of unexpectedness, combined with inevitability and economy.
Combined
-
Reductio ad absurdum, which Euclid loved so much, is one of a mathematician's finest weapons. It is a far finer gambit than any chess play:…
Absurdum
-
The mathematician's patterns, like the painter's or the poet's must be beautiful; the ideas, like the colours or the words must fit together in a…
Beautiful
-
The study of mathematics is, if an unprofitable, a perfectly harmless and innocent occupation.
Harmless
-
[P]ure mathematics is on the whole distinctly more useful than applied. For what is useful above all is technique, and mathematical technique is taught mainly…
All
-
As Littlewood said to me once [of the ancient Greeks], they are not clever school boys or "scholarship candidates," but "Fellows of another college."
Ancient
-
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…
Built
-
Real mathematics must be justified as art if it can be justified at all.
All
Browse G. H. Hardy Quotes by Category