Hardy wrote of Srinivasa Ramanujan's untimely death that it was "not a great tragedy" that he died at the age of thirty-two, as he was already too old to do serious mathematics.
"A Mathematician's Apology" is the bitter rant of a man who only valued one thing in his life and had largely lost the ability to do it in his old age. If I had read it and believed it ten years ago, I never would have gone for my Ph.D. in mathematics.
It's been a while since I've read it, but isn't it mostly a theory on what makes something beautiful and worth doing? It's always struck me as being probably one of the most important essays of all time.
I find it interesting that what Aaron and you took from the essay has essentially zero overlap with my take.
I think devoting your life to one thing is the temptation of a life in academia, but it also is a path to bitterness.
Management was an escape for a while. And luckily it disappeared, like teenage allergies. Now I can't wait to hack in the mornings. But at the time, it was devastating.
On a related point, all the folks I know who exited programming for other careers, were lesser programmers. I certainly didn't want to make that self-discovery. :)
Of course it's sometimes unclear if it instead means (or also includes?) burning down the building....
I enjoyed watching 'mahmud and 'delirium go at it over the merits of Hardy, but my comment wasn't judging him and didn't ask for that debate.
And yet you still got voted up. Why do you think that is?
As far as I can tell, Hardy was born to a fairly middle-class family (parents were schoolteachers), and got his job at Oxford because he was one of the best English mathematicians of his generation.
Hardy didn't "work" for a living, to him mathematics was an obsessive hobby. He had a very strict routine; get up, walk, maths, watch cricket, tea, maths, eat, etc. He almost had the same daily routine as Kant, another bore, except the cricket.
Also, class has nothing to do with it. He was born into the imperial crown, and given his education, he was guaranteed a post in India or Africa and a "handsome life". The man was no Russel; he was an elitist who was indifferent to reaping the rewards of colonialism.
Knuth is very much a proletariat. No comparison.
And really, "whining, privileged bore" wasn't intended as an insult?
Also, how does Russell fare better in your comparison? An aristocrat who wrote "In Praise of Idleness" while never having to work a day in his life? The archetype of the upper-class, socialist professor?
That's not quite right. He did at least consulting work outside of academia. As I quote him in Coders at Work: "For example, some of the best work I did for Burroughs Corporation was to debug their hardware designs. Their engineers would show me the specs for their computer and I would look at it and I would try to construct examples where they would be off by 1 or something. I got more than 200 bugs out of their B-5000–series machines before they went into production, although it had passed the simulators."
Hardy didn't have a fraction of these "distractions".
You think I'm dismissive of Hardy because of his academic career. I'm not. It's his colonial era, easy ranks and easier money, that I'm critical of.
Methinks somebody is jelly...
But really, why should we judge mathematicians by their social stature? Should we also judge Tony Hawk for his lack of sea-turtle related knowledge? It's completely beside the point, you're just looking for something to complain about.
The colonial and classist attitude is pervasive and shapes his mathematical aesthetics.
That applies to a good number of Silicon Valley programmers. Do they not need to "work" for a living, simply because they can get paid for their obsessive hobbies?
Hardy was a Cambridge brat; people like him were born & bred for foreign posts. The closest thing today might be being born anglo, going through military academies all your life, then graduating West Point: you ARE guaranteed certain top positions for life.