Most People Can Do Nothing At All

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.

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.

No One Should Ever Be Bored. … One Can Be Horrified, Or Disgusted, But One Can’t Be Bored.

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

No One Has Yet Discovered Any Warlike Purpose To Be Served By The Theory Of Numbers Or Relativity, And It Seems Unlikely That Anyone Will Do So For Many Years.