G. H. Hardy Short Quotes

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Chess problems are the hymn-tunes of mathematics.

G. H. Hardy
I am interested in mathematics only as a creative art.

G. H. Hardy
Young men should prove theorems, old men should write books.

G. H. Hardy
I was at my best at a little past forty, when I was a professor at Oxford.

G. H. Hardy
I do not know an instance of a major mathematical advance initiated by a man past fifty

G. H. Hardy
The study of mathematics is, if an unprofitable, a perfectly harmless and innocent occupation.

G. H. Hardy
Sometimes one has to say difficult things, but one ought to say them as simply as one knows how.

G. H. Hardy
Cricket is the only game where you are playing against eleven of the other side and ten of your own.

G. H. Hardy
Mathematical fame, if you have the cash to pay for it, is one of the soundest and steadiest of investments.

G. H. Hardy
In [great mathematics] there is a very high degree of unexpectedness, combined with inevitability and economy.

G. H. Hardy
As history proves abundantly, mathematical achievement, whatever its intrinsic worth, is the most enduring of all.

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
If a man has any genuine talent, he should be ready to make almost any sacrifice in order to cultivate it to the full.

G. H. Hardy
It is not worth an intelligent man's time to be in the majority. By definition, there are already enough people to do that.

G. H. Hardy
It is never worth a first class man's time to express a majority opinion. By definition there are plenty of others to do that.

G. H. Hardy
No mathematician should ever allow himself to forget that mathematics, more than any other art or science, is a young man's game.

G. H. Hardy
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 the world.

G. H. Hardy
Most people are so frightened of the name of mathematics that they are ready, quite unaffectedly, to exaggerate their own mathematical stupidity.

G. H. Hardy
The primes are the raw material out of which we have to build arithmetic, and Euclid's theorem assures us that we have plenty of material for the task.

G. H. Hardy
A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.

G. H. Hardy
No one has yet discovered any warlike purpose to be served by the theory of numbers or relativity, and it seems unlikely that anyone will do so for many years.

G. H. Hardy
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 reality is built that way.

G. H. Hardy
We may say, roughly, that a mathematical idea is "significant" if it can be connected, in a natural and illuminating way, with a large complex of other mathematical ideas.

G. H. Hardy
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 the destruction of human life.

G. H. Hardy
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 a mathematician.

G. H. Hardy
The "seriousness" of a mathematical theorem lies, not in its practical consequences, which are usually negligible, but in the significance of the mathematical ideas which it connects.

G. H. Hardy
Pure mathematics is on the whole distinctly more useful than applied. [...] For what is useful above all is technique, and mathematical technique is taught mainly through pure mathematics.

G. H. Hardy
… 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.

G. H. Hardy
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 than Greek literature.

G. H. Hardy