"The best mathematics is serious as well as beautiful—‘important’ if you like, but the word is very ambiguous, and ‘serious’ expresses what I mean much...
I am interested in mathematics only as a creative art.
~ G. H. Hardy ~
I am interested in mathematics only as a creative art.
More G. H. Hardy quotes
"...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, because mathematical re...
"Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics.
"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 mathe...
"The ‘seriousness’ of a mathematical theorem lies, not in its practical consequences, which are usually negligible, but in the significance of the math...
"[I was advised] to read Jordan's 'Cours d'analyse'; and I shall never forget the astonishment with which I read that remarkable work, the first inspir...
"Real mathematics must be justified as art if it can be justified at all.
"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 w...
"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 harm...
"[Regarding mathematics,] there are now few studies more generally recognized, for good reasons or bad, as profitable and praiseworthy. This may be tru...
"In these days of conflict between ancient and modern studies, there must surely be something to be said for a study which did not begin with Pythagora...
"Archimedes will be remembered when Aeschylus is forgotten, because languages die and mathematical ideas do not. “Immortality” may be a silly word, but...
"Most people have some appreciation of mathematics, just as most people can enjoy a pleasant tune; and there are probably more people really interested...
"It seems that mathematical ideas are arranged somehow in strata, the ideas in each stratum being linked by a complex of relations both among themselve...
"The geometer offers to the physicist a whole set of maps from which to choose. One map, perhaps, will fit the facts better than others, and then the g...