A Mathematicians Apology

G. H. Hardy was one of this centurys finest mathematical thinkers, renowned among his contemporaries as a real mathematician ... the purest of the pure. He was also, as C. P. Snow recounts in his Foreword, unorthodox, eccentric, radical, ready to talk about anything. This apology, written in 1940, offers a brilliant and engaging account of mathematics as very much more than a science; when it was first published, Graham Greene hailed it alongside Henry Jamess notebooks as the best account of what it was like to be a creative artist. C. P. Snows Foreword gives sympathetic and witty insights into Hardys life, with its rich store of anecdotes concerning his collaboration with the brilliant Indian mathematician Ramanujan, his idiosyncrasies, and his passion for cricket. This is a unique account of the fascination of mathematics and of one of its most compelling exponents in