Sublime

Underneath his shyness, he just didn’t give a damn.

In both theorems (and in the theorems, of course, I include the proofs) there is a very high degree of unexpectedness, combined with inevitability and economy.

Good work is not done by ‘humble’ men.

‘it is the large generalization, limited by a happy particularity, which is the fruitful conception3.’

high thinking of one kind is always likely to affect high thinking of another

A ‘SERIOUS’ theorem is a theorem which contains ‘significant’ ideas,

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

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.

‘Sometimes one has to say difficult things, but one ought to say them as simply as one knows how.’