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A Mathematician's Apology is a 1940 essay by British mathematician G. H. Hardy which defends the pursuit of mathematics for its own sake.
- G. H. Hardy, C. P. Snow
- 1940
G. H. Hardy. First Published November 1940. As fifty or more years have passed since the death of the author, this book is now in the public domain in the Dominion of Canada. First Electronic Edition, Version 1.0 March 2005. Published by the University of Alberta Mathematical Sciences Society.
Is mathematics, what I and other mathematicians mean by mathematics, worth doing; and if so, why? I have been looking again at the first pages of the inaugural lecture which I gave at Oxford in 1920, where there is an outline of an apology for mathematics.
This 'apology', written in 1940, offers a brilliant and engaging account of mathematics as very much more than a science; when it was first published, Graham Greene hailed it alongside Henry James's notebooks as 'the best account of what it was like to be a creative artist'.
- G. H. Hardy, C. P. Snow
- 1940
Feb 2, 2019 · The works of G. H. Hardy (1877–1947), including ‘A Mathematician's Apology’ and ‘Mathematics in war-time’ are in the public domain. The annotations and the essays on the context, reviews, and legacy of the ‘Apology’ © 2019–24 Alan J. Cain.
Summary. I t 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.
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(The Apology is in the public domain and can readily be found online; it is short and beautifully writ- ten.) The same essay goes on to make a sequence of startling statements, like these: It is undeniable that a good deal of elementary mathematics .. has considerable practical utility. These parts of mathematics are, on the whole, rather dull....
