Fiona's Reviews > A Mathematician's Apology

I nearly studied maths at university, because of this book.

When I was sixteen, I was scared of the grades and numbers end of academia, and I was determined that whatever I was going to study - and it was going to be something, and a lot of it - I was going to do it for the love of it. I was going to read around my subjects, follow tangents and pick whatever took my fancy. So, a few months into a Maths A-level, I took this out of Southampton Central Library, and I didn't give it back for nearly a year. The joy for numbers and patterns is infectious. The pure love for picking out order and seeing connections is one of my favourite things. I am convinced that you can talk about the most boring subject in the world, whatever it may be, but if you do it with love and that sparkle in your eye, people will want to listen, and ask questions, and find out more.

This is how GH Hardy made mathematics for me, and why sometimes I still look him up, and come back to this book, and remember why scholarship and finding out about things make me more excited about the world than anything else. They make me remember why I fall in love with people who get enthusiastic, and why I seek out friends who know about things that I don't, and why I read widely. This book sparked my love of recreational maths, word puzzles, cryptic crosswords, steganography.

The first time I read his proof for why the square root of two is an irrational number - short, quick, and with "Isn't this beautiful?" commentary - I followed it along with a pen and paper. I love his discussion of elegance, and how you can do things with numbers that are elegant, and why that is a legitimate thing to strive for. In the rest of my life, I want to make things that are elegant and clever and reach out to people like GH Hardy does. Every so often I come back to it and I get exactly the same feelings and they push me forward again. This is a book for when I am tired of everything else. It helps me go back to looking things in the eye.

The first half of A Mathematician's Apology is a foreword, and it is a friend and former student of Hardy's writing about his life. The context of a story is never as clean and self-contained as the story itself. Real life that has not been picked and chosen is not as clean as that single persuasive essay with the purpose of showing you how much fun a thing can be. The foreword makes me want to go out and read everything and write things down, because I have to do it all now, because one day I won't be able to.

I don't get to recommend this book to very many people, because apparently "it's about maths" is a turn-off. Somehow when I recommend this to people they have a very long to-read list that rears its head in the way that it doesn't for other books. That's okay. It's special to me, and a gem that I will quietly nurse for the times that I'm sad, and I won't force it on people with such phenomenally long other lists. But this book has amplified the person that I might have been into the person that I am, and every so often it does it again, and GH Hardy feels like one of my best friends even though this is all of his work that I know, and I am an non-Oxbridge-educated girl so if we'd met I would have bored him to tears. It's okay. I've got a lot from it anyway.