How long does it take to read A Mathematician's Apology?
G. H. Hardy, Iñaki Iñurrieta Labaien, John von Neumann, Pedro Pacheco González
A Mathematician's Apology by G. H. Hardy, Iñaki Iñurrieta Labaien, John von Neumann, Pedro Pacheco González takes about 2 hours 48 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 2 hours 48 minutes
An evening's read
First published 1940. 153 pages, about 42,075 words.
6 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 4 hours 41 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 2 hours 48 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 1 hour 45 minutes |
The page count is the median across 36 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
G. H. Hardy was one of this century's finest mathematical thinkers, renowned among his contemporaries as a 'real mathematician … the purest of the pure'. He was also (as C. P. Snow recounts in his Foreword to the 1967 edition) 'unorthodox, eccentric, radical, ready to talk about anything'. This 'apology', written in 1940 as his mathematical powers were declining, offers a brilliant and engaging account of mathematics as very much more than a science; when it was first published, Graham Greene hailed it alongside Henry James's notebooks as 'the best account of what it was like to be a creative artist'. C. P. Snow's Foreword gives sympathetic and witty insights into Hardy's life, with its rich store of anecdotes concerning his collaboration with the brilliant Indian mathematician Ramanujan, his aphorisms and idiosyncrasies, and his passion for cricket. This is a unique account of the fascination of mathematics and of one of its most compelling exponents in modern times.
Subjects: Mathematics, Addresses, essays, lectures, Pure Mathematics, Philosophy, Wiskunde, Matematica
