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G. H. Hardy

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A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.

 
G. H. Hardy

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The mathematician’s patterns, like the painter’s or the poet’s must be beautiful; the ideas like the colours or the words, must fit together in a harmonious way. Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics.

 
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A painter makes patterns with shapes and colours, a poet with words. A painting may embody an ‘idea’, but the idea is usually commonplace and unimportant. In poetry, ideas count for a good deal more; but, [...] the importance of ideas in poetry is habitually exaggerated: '... Poetry is no the thing said but a way of saying it.' [In poetry,] the poverty of the ideas seems hardly to affect the beauty of the verbal pattern.

 
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“Which was crazier, she wondered, seeing patterns when they weren’t there, or ignoring patterns when they obviously were?”

 
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Her mind has been conditioned unusually. It may be that she breaks down what she sees into simple, obvious patterns  and realizes a significance to those patterns that we can't understand. Like the abacus. She saw a pattern in that, though to us it was completely random.

 
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The impossibility of penetrating the divine pattern of the universe cannot stop us from planning human patterns, even though we are conscious they are not definitive. The analytic language of Wilkins is not the least admirable of such patterns.

 
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