“It was a perfectly ordinary night at Christ’s high table, except that Hardy was’ dining as a guest. He had just returned to Cambridge as Sadleirian professor, and I had heard some- thing of him from young Cambridge mathematicians. They were delighted to have him back: he was a real mathematician, they said, not like those Diracs and Bohrs the physicists were always talking about: he was the purest of the pure. He was also unorthodox, eccentric, radical, ready to talk about anything.”

So writes C. P. Snow in his introduction to this reissue of a book that has long been treas- ured by mathematicians, and others to whom mathematics is an attractive mystery.

The book is a personal account by a distin- guished mathematician of what mathematics meant to him as a man. Hardy discusses and illustrates the attractive force of mathematics. He dismisses its utility but describes its depth and beauty as a creative art.

Hardy asks : Is it worth man’s while to give his life to the study of mathematics ? His answer is of necessity personal, and indeed that is the book’s value. It holds the confessions of an unrepentant but humane mathematician; his candid integrity and good humour make a finite addition to the sum of human thought.