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Mathematics Quote by G.H. Hardy

“It (proof by contradiction) is a far finer gambit than any chess gambit: a chess player may offer the sacrifice of a pawn or even a piece, but a mathematician offers the game.” quote by G.H. Hardy — Download Open image

““It (proof by contradiction) is a far finer gambit than any chess gambit: a chess player may offer the sacrifice of a pawn or even a piece, but a mathematician offers the game.””

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Mathematics

More by G.H. Hardy

“The Greeks were the first mathematicians who are still ‘real’ to us to-day. Oriental mathematics may be an interesting curiosity, but Greek mathematics is the real thing. The Greeks first spoke a language which modern mathematicians can understand: as Littlewood said to me once, they are not clever schoolboys or ‘scholarship candidates’, but ‘Fellows of another college’. So Greek mathematics…

“If the theory of numbers could be employed for any practical and obviously honourable purpose, if it could be turned directly to the furtherance of human happiness or the relief of human suffering, as physiology and even chemistry can, then surely neither Gauss nor any other mathematician would have been so foolish as to decry or regret such applications. But…

“Even a pure mathematician may find his appreciation of this geometry [applied geometry] quickened, since there is no mathematician so pure that he feels…

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“Immortality is often ridiculous or cruel: few of us would have chosen to be Og or Ananias or Gallio. Even in mathematics, history sometimes plays strange tricks; Rolle figures in the textbooks of elementary calculus as if he had been a mathematician like Newton; Farey is immortal because he failed to understand a theorem which Haros had proved perfectly fourteen…

“One rather curious conclusion emerges, that pure mathematics is on the whole distinctly more useful than applied. ... For what is useful above all…

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“It is the dull and elementary parts of applied mathematics, as it is the dull and elementary parts of pure mathematics, that work for…

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“The seriousness of a theorem, of course, does not lie in its consequences, which are merely the evidence for its seriousness.”

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“Judged by all practical standards, the value of my mathematical life is nil; and outside mathematics it is trivial anyhow. I have just one…

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“I had better say something here about this question of age, since it is particularly important for mathematicians. No mathematician should ever allow himself…

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“I still say to myself when I am depressed, and find myself forced to listen to pompous and tiresome people, 'Well, I have done…

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“The beauty of a mathematical theorem depends a great deal on its seriousness, as even in poetry the beauty of a line may depend…

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“The mathematician is in much more direct contact with reality. This may seem a paradox, since it is the physicist who deals with the…

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Explore all 14 G.H. Hardy quotes

More Mathematics quotes

For the execution of the voyage to the Indies, I did not make use of intelligence, mathematics or maps.

Christopher Columbus

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Rule number something or other -- never tell anybody anything unless you're going to get something better in return.

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There's no reason for men to be better at maths than women - it's just about our perception.

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For a physicist mathematics is not just a tool by means of which phenomena can be calculated, it is the main source of concepts…

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Geometry, which should only obey Physics, when united with it sometimes commands it. If it happens that the question which we wish to examine is too complicated for all the elements to be able to enter into the analytical comparison we wish to make, we separate the more inconvenient [elements], we substitute others for them, less troublesome but also less…

Jean le Rond d'Alembert

In school math and science were my favorite subjects, but I probably in my true self I'm more of a people person. At the…

Emily Deschanel

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“How in the world did I ever find you?” Mackenzie Winters “Math class.” Brandon Knight”

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“One is the notion that knowledge is worth acquiring, all knowledge, and that a solid grounding in mathematics provides one with the essential language of many of the most important forms of knowledge. The third theme is that, while it is desirable to live peaceably, there are things worth fighting for and values worth dying for—and that it is far…

William H. Patterson Jr

“When one day Lagrange took out of his pocket a paper which he read at the Académe, and which contained a demonstration of the famous Postulatum of Euclid , relative to the theory of parallels. This demonstration rested on an obvious paralogism, which appeared as such to everybody; and probably Lagrange also recognised it such during his lecture. For, when…

Jean-Baptiste Biot

“We are not told, or not told early enough so that it sinks in, that mathematics is a language, and that we can learn it like any other, including our own. We have to learn our own language twice, first when we learn to speak it, second when we learn to read it. Fortunately, mathematics has to be learned only…

Mortimer J. Adler

The dialectic is neither fiction nor mysticism, but a science of the forms of our thinking insofar as it is not limited to the…

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Our eyes met in the math class. How were we to know that trigonometry would lead to matrimony?

Sophie Kinsella

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