I do not think that G. H. Hardy was talking nonsense when he insisted that the mathematician was discovering rather than creating… The world for me is a necessary system, and in the degree to...

the Bradman class” denoted the highest kind of excellence: it would include Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Newton, Archimedes, and maybe a dozen others. Well, said Hardy, there had only been two additions in his lifetime. One was...

Littlewood, on Hardy’s own estimate, is the finest mathematician he has ever known. He was the man most likely to storm and smash a really deep and formidable problem; there was no one else who...

{Replying to G. H. Hardy’s suggestion that the number of a taxi (1729) was ‘dull’, showing off his spontaneous mathematical genius}No, it is a very interesting number; it is the smallest number expressible as a...

Plenty of mathematicians, Hardy knew, could follow a step-by-step discursus unflaggingly—yet counted for nothing beside Ramanujan. Years later, he would contrive an informal scale of natural mathematical ability on which he assigned himself a 25...