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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
- G. H. Hardy, C. P. Snow
- 1940
As I had plenty of opportunities to realize in the future, Hardy had no faith in intuitions or impressions, his own or anyone else's. The only way to assess someone's knowledge, in Hardy's view, was to examine him. That went for mathe matics, literature, philosophy, politics, anything you like.
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
G. H. H. 18 July 1940. 1. 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.
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.
|vii PREFACE 59 IamindebtedformanyvaluablecriticismstoPro-fessorC.D.Broad3 andDrC.P.Snow,4 eachofwhomreadmy originalmanuscript.Ihaveincorporatedthesubstanceofnearly ...
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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.
