19 quotes
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.
A Mathematician's Apology (1941)
If I knew I was going to die today, I think I should still want to hear the cricket scores.
A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.
Chess problems are the hymn-tunes of mathematics.
A Mathematician's Apology (1941)
If a man has any genuine talent, he should be ready to make almost any sacrifice in order to cultivate it to the full.
A Mathematician's Apology (1941)
I am interested in mathematics only as a creative art.
A Mathematician's Apology (1941)
If I could prove by logic that you would die in five minutes, I should be sorry you were going to die, but my sorrow would be very much mitigated by pleasure in the proof.
The geometer offers ...a whole set of maps from which to choose.
A Mathematician's Apology (1941)
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.
A Mathematician's Apology (1941)
Archimedes will be remembered when Aeschylus is forgotten, because languages die and mathematical ideas do not. "Immortality" may be a silly word, but probably a mathematician has the best chance of whatever it may mean.
A Mathematician's Apology (1941)
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.
A Mathematician's Apology (1941)
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.
A Mathematician's Apology (1941)
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. (pg 46)
A Mathematician's Apology (1941)
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 so, because mathematical reality is built that way.
A Mathematician's Apology (1941)
It is... natural to suppose that there is a great difference in utility between 'pure' and 'applied' mathematics. This is a delusion...
A Mathematician's Apology (1941)
… 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.
A Mathematician's Apology (1941)
A man who could give a convincing account of mathematical reality would have solved very many of the most difficult problems of metaphysics. If he could include physical reality in his account, he would have solved them all.
A Mathematician's Apology (1941)
Reductio ad absurdum, which Euclid loved so much, is one of a mathematician's finest weapons. It 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 mathematician offers the game.
A Mathematician's Apology (1941)
I still say to myself when I am depressed and find myself forced to listen to pompous and tiresome people 'Well, I have done one thing you could never have done, and that is to have collaborated with Littlewood and Ramanujan on something like equal terms.'
A Mathematician's Apology (1941)