I particularly thought this was cute:
"It is one of the first duties of a professor, for example, in any subject, to exaggerate a little both the importance of his subject and his own importance in it. A man who is always asking ‘Is what I do worth while?’ and ‘Am I the right person to do it?’ will always be ineffective himself and a discouragement to others. He must shut his eyes a little and think a little more of his subject and himself than they deserve."
You are just a curmudgeonist!
Erdős is a good counterexample to his argument. Even Euler. Many famous mathematicians have produced good work late in their lives.
I think people these days are just not emotionally honest, people have to be 'positive' all the time.
“I am saved, I think, because it appears that Hardy’s logic to some extent parallels mine. Why is it important for the man who “can bat unusually well” to become “a professional cricketer”? It is, presumably, because those who can bat unusually well are in short supply and so the few who are gifted with that talent should do us all the favor of making use of it. If those whose “judgment of the markets is quick and sound” become cricketers, while the good batters become stockbrokers, we will end up with mediocre cricketers and mediocre stockbrokers. Better for all of us if the reverse is the case.
But this, of course, is awfully similar to the logic I myself employed. It is important for me to spend my life explaining what I’d learned because people who had learned it are in short supply — much shorter supply, in fact (or so it appears), than people who can bat well.”
"I have never done anything 'useful'. No discovery of mine has made, or is likely to make, directly or indirectly, for good or ill, the least difference to the amenity of the world."
He contributed a lot of practical findings in math. The Hardy-Weinberg principle[0] comes to mind...
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardy%E2%80%93Weinberg_princip...
(I do not say that to diminish its importance, which is an entirely separate matter. And something can be mathematically trivial but still an important discovery -- the cleverness may e.g. reside in noticing that it's a thing that might be true at all. Be all that as it may, I can't imagine Hardy, given his general dismissive attitude to applications of mathematics, seeing it as a discovery rather than a triviality that happened to be useful to biologists.)
I was once in a position where lots of people wrote me letters seeking to tell me about their talents. All the letters went unread to my dustbin. True and sad.
As for discussion. Is not the quote "We live either by rule of thumb or on other people’s professional knowledge." the most antithetical to hacker culture you've ever heard?!?
Also, to be fair, the elementary analysis book which Hardy wrote under the title A Course of Pure Mathematics by today's standards would hardly qualify as a book on 'pure math' anyway.
I think it should be fair. It's no secret what these precision guided bombs are being used for, so why should the nerds that continue to work on them be free of culpability?
