“…there is probably less difference between the positions of a mathematician and of a physicist than is generally supposed, […] the mathematician is in much more direct contact with reality. This may seem a paradox, since it is the physicist who deals with the subject-matter usually described as ‘real’, but […] [a physicist] is trying to correlate the incoherent body of crude fact confronting him with some definite and orderly scheme of abstract relations, the kind of scheme he can borrow only from mathematics.”

— G. H. Hardy , book A Mathematician's Apology

A Mathematician's Apology (1941)

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G. H. Hardy 20

British mathematician 1877–1947

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