A Science Is Said To Be Useful

It Is Rather Astonishing How Little Practical Value Scientific Knowledge Has For Ordinary Men, How Dull And Commonplace Such Of It As Has Value Is, And How Its Value Seems Almost To Vary Inversely To Its Reputed Utility.

I Count Maxwell And Einstein, Eddington And Dirac, Among "real" Mathematicians. The Great Modern Achievements Of Applied Mathematics Have Been In Relativity And Quantum Mechanics, And These Subjects Are At Present At Any Rate, Almost As "useless" As The Theory Of Numbers.

... Philosophy Proper Is A Subject, On The One Hand So Hopelessly Obscure, On The Other So Astonishingly Elementary, That There Knowledge Hardly Counts.

All Analysts Spend Half Their Time Hunting Through The Literature For Inequalities Which They Want To Use And Cannot Prove.

Beauty Is The First Test: There Is No Permanent Place In The World For Ugly Mathematics.