The Creative Life Was The Only One

Reductio Ad Absurdum, Which Euclid Loved So Much, Is One Of A Mathematician's Finest Weapons. It Is A Far Finer Gambit Than Any Chess Play: A Chess Player May Offer The Sacrifice Of A Pawn Or Even A Piece, But A Mathematician Offers The Game.

Exposition, Criticism, Appreciation, Is Work For Second-rate Minds.

No Mathematician Should Ever Allow Him To Forget That Mathematics, More Than Any Other Art Or Science, Is A Young Man's Game. ... Galois Died At Twenty-one, Abel At Twenty-seven, Ramanujan At Thirty-three, Riemann At Forty. There Have Been Men Who Have Done Great Work Later; ... [but] I Do Not Know Of A Single Instance Of A Major Mathematical Advance Initiated By A Man Past Fifty. ... A Mathematician May Still Be Competent Enough At Sixty, But It Is Useless To Expect Him To Have Original Ideas.

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.

Most People Have Some Appreciation Of Mathematics, Just As Most People Can Enjoy A Pleasant Tune; And There Are Probably More People Really Interested In Mathematics Than In Music. Appearances Suggest The Contrary, But There Are Easy Explanations. Music Can Be Used To Stimulate Mass Emotion, While Mathematics Cannot; And Musical Incapacity Is Recognized (no Doubt Rightly) As Mildly Discreditable, Whereas Most People Are So Frightened Of The Name Of Mathematics That They Are Ready, Quite Unaffectedly, To Exaggerate Their Own Mathematical Stupidity