Chess Problems Are The Hymn-tunes Of Mathematics.

A Mathematician ... Has No Material To Work With But Ideas, And So His Patterns Are Likely To Last Longer, Since Ideas Wear Less With Time Than Words.

Most People Can Do Nothing At All Well

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.

The Theory Of Numbers, More Than Any Other Branch Of Mathematics, Began By Being An Experimental Science. Its Most Famous Theorems Have All Been Conjectured, Sometimes A Hundred Years Or More Before They Were Proved; And They Have Been Suggested By The Evidence Of A Mass Of Computations.

I Do Not Remember Having Felt, As A Boy, Any Passion For Mathematics, And Such Notions As I May Have Had Of The Career Of A Mathematician Were Far From Noble. I Thought Of Mathematics In Terms Of Examinations And Scholarships: I Wanted To Beat Other Boys, And This Seemed To Be The Way In Which I Could Do So Most Decisively.