No Mathematician Should Ever Allow Himself To

A Science Is Said To Be Useful If Its Development Tends To Accentuate The Existing Inequalities In The Distribution Of Wealth, Or More Directly Promotes The Destruction Of Human Life.

Archimedes Will Be Remembered When Aeschylus Is Forgotten, Because Languages Die And Mathematical Ideas Do Not. "immortality" May Be A Silly Word, But Probably A Mathematician Has The Best Chance Of Whatever It May Mean.

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.

A Science Or An Art May Be Said To Be "useful" If Its Development Increases, Even Indirectly, The Material Well-being And Comfort Of Men, It Promotes Happiness, Using That Word In A Crude And Commonplace Way.

I Am Obliged To Interpolate Some Remarks On A Very Difficult Subject: Proof And Its Importance In Mathematics. All Physicists, And A Good Many Quite Respectable Mathematicians, Are Contemptuous About Proof. I Have Heard Professor Eddington, For Example, Maintain That Proof, As Pure Mathematicians Understand It, Is Really Quite Uninteresting And Unimportant, And That No One Who Is Really Certain That He Has Found Something Good Should Waste His Time Looking For Proof.