G. H. Hardy Quotes

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.

One would be hard put to find a set of whole numbers with a more fascinating history and more elegant properties surrounded by greater depths of mystery--and more totally useless--than the perfect numbers.

Mathematics is not something that you find lying around in your back yard. It's produced by the human mind. Yet if we ask where mathematics works best, it is in areas like particle physics and astrophysics, areas of fundamental science that are very, very far removed from everyday affairs.

Most people don't have time to master the very mathematical details of theoretical physics.

This book is about physics and its about physics and its relationship with mathematics and how they seem to be intimately related and to what extent can you explore this relationship and trust it.

The abstract analysis of the world by mathematics and physics rests on the concepts of space and time.

I would say in one sentence my goal is to at least be part of the journey to find the unified theory that Einstein himself was really the first to look for.

For the things of this world cannot be made known without a knowledge of mathematics.

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.

There is no branch of mathematics, however abstract, which may not some day be applied to phenomena of the real world

I am not enough of a mathematician to be able to judge either the well-foundedness or the limits of relativity in physics.

My interest in science started quite early. My earliest school recollection, from age 6, is actually of mathematics, realizing that one could fill an entire page with digits and never come to the largest possible number, so I saw what was meant by infinity.

Primes are the atoms of the arithmetic - the hydrogen and oxygen of the world of numbers

Mathematics commands all my respect, but I have no use for engines.

Quantum field theory, which was born just fifty years ago from the marriage of quantum mechanics with relativity, is a beautiful but not very robust child.

You have this world of mathematics, which is very real and which contains all kinds of wonderful stuff. And then we also have the world of nature, which is real, too.

It is almost as hard to define mathematics as it is to define economics, and one is tempted to fall back on the famous old definition attributed to Jacob Viner, "Economics is what economists do," and say that mathematics is what mathematicians do. A large part of mathematics deals with the formal relations of quantities or numbers.

Only Numbers. Pure math. You have to accustom yourself to thinking that way.

If you think about basic science or coming up with new theories of mathematics, these are not the kinds of things which are necessarily a well-defined market to pay people.

I can show you that the art of calculation has to do with odd and even numbers in their numerical relations to themselves and to each other.

Nature does not count nor do integers occur in nature. Man made them all, integers and all the rest, Kronecker to the contrary notwithstanding.

For mathematics, even to the logical forms in which it moves, is entirely dependent on the concept of natural number.

I didn't want to become a pure mathematician, as a matter of fact, my uncle was one, so I knew what the pure mathematician was and I did not want to be a pure - I wanted to do something different.

If equations are trains threading the landscape of numbers, then no train stops at pi.

There is only one real number: one. And love, apparently, is the best exponent of this singularity.