Music at times is
Music at times is more like perfume than mathematics. Gabriel Marcel
Mathematician
[On the Gaussian curve,
[On the Gaussian curve, remarked to Poincaré:] Experimentalists think that it is a mathematical theorem while the mathematicians believe it to be an experimental fact. Gabriel Lippmann
It is a melancholy
It is a melancholy experience for a professional mathematician to find himself writing about mathematics. The function of a mathematician is to do something, to prove new theorems, to add to mathematics, and not to talk about what he or other mathematicians have done. Statesmen despise publicists, painters despise art-critics, and physiologists, physicists, or mathematicians … Read more
If a man is
If a man is in any sense a real mathematician, then it is a hundred to one that his mathematics will be far better than anything else he can do, and that he would be silly if he surrendered any decent opportunity of exercising his one talent in order to do undistinguished work in other … Read more
[I was advised] to
[I was advised] to read Jordan’s ‘Cours d’analyse’; and I shall never forget the astonishment with which I read that remarkable work, the first inspiration for so many mathematicians of my generation, and learnt for the first time as I read it what mathematics really meant. G. H. Hardy
No mathematician should ever
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
I count Maxwell and
I count Maxwell and Einstein, Eddington and Dirac, among real mathematicians. The great modern achievements of applied mathematics have been in relativity and quantum mechanics, and these subjects are at present at any rate, almost as useless as the theory of numbers. G. H. Hardy
A mathematician … has
A mathematician … has no material to work with but ideas, and so his patterns are likely to last longer, since ideas wear less with time than words. G. H. Hardy
I do not remember
I do not remember having felt, as a boy, any passion for mathematics, and such notions as I may have had of the career of a mathematician were far from noble. I thought of mathematics in terms of examinations and scholarships: I wanted to beat other boys, and this seemed to be the way in … Read more
The mathematician’s patterns, like
The mathematician’s patterns, like the painter’s or the poet’s, must be beautiful. G. H. Hardy