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A Mathematician's Apology is a 1940 essay by British mathematician G. H. Hardy, which offers a defence of the pursuit of mathematics. Central to Hardy's " apology " – in the sense of a formal justification or defence (as in Plato 's Apology of Socrates ) – is an argument that mathematics has value independent of possible applications.
- G. H. Hardy, C. P. Snow
- 1940
Published in 1940, A Mathematician’s Apology, by G. H. Hardy, is an extended essay on why people study mathematics and how its logical purity, much more than its usefulness in daily life, makes it a worthy pursuit. Hardy was one of the 20th century’s most important mathematicians.
This 'apology', written in 1940 as his mathematical powers were declining, 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'. C.
- J. F. Randolph, G. H. Hardy
- 1942
Aug 5, 2014 · Thus Whitehead (who has been a mathematician) speaks of ‘the tremendous effect of mathematical knowledge on the lives of men, on their daily avocations, on the organization of society’; and Hogben (who is as unsympathetic to what I and other mathematicians call mathematics as White-head is sympathetic) says that ‘without a knowledge of mathemati...
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 mathema-ticians have done.
Dec 26, 2011 · G.H. Hardy is one of the very few mathematicians who’s been immortalized in song, by the Embarrassment no less: Hardy’s little book, A Mathematician’s Apology (that’s apology in the sense of defense, not regret), written in 1940 near the end of his career, is an eloquent and concise statement of the mathematician’s, theoretician’s ...
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A Mathematician's Apology is perhaps the most concise piece every written describing the creative process of doing mathematics. Its author, G H Hardy, a world-class theorist of the period between the great wars, describes his attraction to mathematics, defending the role of the pure mathematician.
