G. H. Hardy - Proof Quotes

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I am obliged to interpolate some remarks on a very difficult subject: proof and its importance in mathematics. All physicists, and a good many quite respectable mathematicians, are contemptuous about proof. I have heard Professor Eddington, for example, maintain that proof, as pure mathematicians understand it, is really quite uninteresting and unimportant, and that no one who is really certain that he has found something good should waste his time looking for proof.

G. H. Hardy

There is, strictly, no such thing as mathematical proof; that we can::: do nothing but point; that proofs are what Littlewood and I call gas, rhetorical flourishes designed to affect psychology, pictures on the board in the lectures, devices to stimulate the imagination of pupils.

G. H. Hardy

A mathematical proof should resemble a simple and clear-cut constellation, not a scattered cluster in the Milky Way.

G. H. Hardy