If intellectual curiosity, professional pride, and ambition are the dominant incentives to research, then assuredly no one has a fairer chance of gratifying them than a mathematician.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes that mathematicians have unique opportunities to satisfy their intellectual curiosity and ambition through research.
G. H. Hardy highlights the significant advantages that mathematicians possess when it comes to research opportunities. He suggests that the combination of intellectual curiosity, professional pride, and ambition makes mathematics a field where individuals can fully explore and gratify these incentives, as the nature of mathematical inquiry often leads to groundbreaking discoveries and personal fulfillment.
In practice
Using this quote at a mathematics conference to inspire researchers.
A chess problem is genuine mathematics, but it is in some way "trivial" mathematics. However, ingenious and intricate, however original and surprising the moves, there is something essential lacking. Chess problems are unimportant. The best mathematics is serious as well as beautiful-"important" if you like, but the word is very ambiguous, and "serious" expresses what I mean much better.
Mathematics is not a contemplative but a creative subject; no one can draw much consolation from it when he has lost the power or the desire to create; and that is apt to happen to a mathematician rather soon. It is a pity, but in that case he does not matter a great deal anyhow, and it would be silly to bother about him.
Exposition, criticism, appreciation, is work for second-rate minds.
It is hardly possible to maintain seriously that the evil done by science is not altogether outweighed by the good. For example, if ten million lives were lost in every war, the net effect of science would still have been to increase the average length of life.
Real mathematics must be justified as art if it can be justified at all.
There is no scorn more profound, or on the whole more justifiable, than that of the men who make for the men who explain. Exposition, criticism, appreciation, is work for second-rate minds.
When a teacher calls a boy by his entire name, it means trouble.
One problem with our current society is that we have an attitude towards education as if it is there to simply make you more clever, make you more ingenious... Even though our society does not emphasize this, the most important use of knowledge and education is to help us understand the importance of engaging in more wholesome actions and bringing about discipline within our minds. The proper utilization of our intelligence and knowledge is to effect changes from within to develop a good heart.
Doing real world projects is, I think, the best way to learn and also to engage the world and find out what the world is all about.
Dogma is actually the only thing that cannot be separated from education. It IS education. A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not teaching. There are no uneducated people; only most people are educated wrong. The true task of culture today is not a task of expansion, but of selection-and-rejection. The educationist must find a creed and teach it.
I do think imagination is enormously valuable, and that children should be encouraged in their imagination. That's very true.
I believe that curiosity, wonder and passion are defining qualities of imaginative minds and great teachers; that restlessness and discontent are vital things; and that intense experience and suffering instruct us in ways that less intense emotions can never do.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.