A Mathematician's Apology (Canto Classics)

Hardy was, in Newton’s phrase, ‘in the prime of his age for invention’, and this came in his early forties, unusually late for a mathematician.

He was the classical anti-narcissist. He could not endure having his photograph taken: so far as I know, there are only five snapshots in existence.

He would have been the first to disclaim that he had any special psychological insight. But he was the most intelligent of men, he had lived with his eyes open and read a lot, and he had obtained a good generalized sense of human nature—robust, indulgent, satirical, and utterly free from moral vanity. He was spiritually candid as few men are (I dou

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 better. I am not thinking of the ‘practical’ consequences of mathematics. I have to return to that point later: at present I will say only that if a chess problem is, in the crude sense, ‘useless’, t

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 harmonious way. Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics.

Here, on the level sand, Between the sea and land, What shall I build or write Against the fall of night? Tell me of runes to grave That hold the bursting wave, Or bastions to design For longer date than mine.

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

His life remained the life of a brilliant young man until he was old: so did his spirit: his games, his interests, kept the lightness of a young don’s. And, like many men who keep a young man’s interests into their sixties, his last years were the darker for it.

The case for my life, then, or for that of any one else who has been a mathematician in the same sense in which I have been one, is this: that I have added something to knowledge, and helped others to add more; and that these somethings have a value which differs in degree only, and not in kind, from that of the creations of the great mathematician