“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.”

— G. H. Hardy

Source: Ramanujan (1940), Ch. I : The Indian mathematician Ramanujan.

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G. H. Hardy 20

British mathematician 1877–1947

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