"It is a melancholy experience for a professional……" — G. H. Hardy
"It is a melancholy experience for a professional mathematician to find himself writing about mathematics. The function of a mathematician is to do something, to prove new theorems, to add to mathematics, and not to talk about what he or other mathematicians have done. Statesmen despise publicists, painters despise art-critics, and physiologists, physicists, or mathematicians have usually similar feelings: there is no scorn more profound, or on the whole more justifiable, than that of the men who make for the men who explain. Exposition, criticism, appreciation, is work for second-rate minds."
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G. H. Hardy
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76 Quotes by G. H. Hardy
G. H. Hardy has 76 quotes on this site.
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If intellectual curiosity, professional pride, and ambition are the dominant incentives to research, then assuredly no one has a fairer…
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[Regarding mathematics,] there are now few studies more generally recognized, for good reasons or bad, as profitable and praiseworthy. This…
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A chess problem is genuine mathematics, but it is in some way "trivial" mathematics. However, ingenious and intricate, however original…
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A science is said to be useful if its development tends to accentuate the existing inequalities in the distribution of…
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No discovery of mine has made, or is likely to make, directly or indirectly, for good or ill, the least…
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Archimedes will be remembered when Aeschylus is forgotten, because languages die and mathematical ideas do not. "Immortality" may be a…
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As history proves abundantly, mathematical achievement, whatever its intrinsic worth, is the most enduring of all.
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Chess problems are the hymn-tunes of mathematics.
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Greek mathematics is the real thing. The Greeks first spoke a language which modern mathematicians can understand... So Greek mathematics…
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I am interested in mathematics only as a creative art.
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I believe that mathematical reality lies outside us, that our function is to discover or observe it, and that the…
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I have never done anything 'useful'. No discovery of mine has made, or is likely to make, directly or indirectly,…
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