G.H. Hardy, A Mathematician's Apology Quotes

Real mathematics must be justified as art if it can be justified at all.

A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than their, it is because they are made with ideas.

A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of poems. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.

The play is independent of the pages on which it is printed, and ‘pure geometries’ are independent of lecture rooms, or of any other detail of the physical world.