If Intellectual Curiosity, Professional Pride, And Ambition

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.

The Mathematician Is In Much More Direct Contact With Reality. ... [whereas] The Physicist's Reality, Whatever It May Be, Has Few Or None Of The Attributes Which Common Sense Ascribes Instinctively To Reality. A Chair May Be A Collection Of Whirling Electrons.

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.

As Littlewood Said To Me Once [of The Ancient Greeks], They Are Not Clever School Boys Or "scholarship Candidates," But "fellows Of Another College."

[i Was Advised] To Read Jordan's 'cours D'analyse'; And I Shall Never Forget The Astonishment With Which I Read That Remarkable Work, The First Inspiration For So Many Mathematicians Of My Generation, And Learnt For The First Time As I Read It What Mathematics Really Meant.