I can remember Bertrand Russell telling me of a horrible dream.
Maynard Keynes, who began his career as a mathematician and who was a
friend of Hardy's, once scolded him: if he had read the stock exchange
quotations half an hour each day with the same concentration he brought
to the cricket scores, he could not have helped becoming a rich man.
Then, from about nine to one, unless he was giving a lecture, he worked
at his own mathematics. Mathematicians not intimate with Hardy in his
later years, nor with cricket, keep repeating that his highest term of
praise was 'in the Hobbs class'. He played more real tennis, and got
steadily better at it (real tennis was an expensive game and took a
largish slice out of a professorial income).
I am not thinking of the 'practical' consequences of mathematics. Why
not abandon it and come out? Is there nothing else more worth your
labour?' There is no one so stupid as to use this sort of language about
mathematics. For my own part I have never once found myself in a
position where such scientific knowledge as I possess, outside pure
mathematics, has brought me the slightest advantage.
So Hardy felt, more than anything, bored. He was as spirited as he had
been at New College