If I knew I was going to die today, I think I should still want to hear the cricket scores. - G.H. Hardy

There is the science of pure geometry, in which there are many geometries, , , non-Euclidean geometry... [etc.]. Each... is a , a pattern of ideas... judged by the interest and beauty of... pattern. It is a map or picture, the... product of many hands, a partial and imperfect copy (yet exact so far as it extends) of a section of mathematical reality. But... there is one thing... of which pure geometries are not pictures, and that is the spatio-temporal reality of the physical world. ...[T]hey cannot be, since earthquakes and eclipses are not mathematical concepts.

[M]athematical reality lies outside us ...our function is to discover or observe it, and ...the theorems ...we prove, and ...describe grandiloquently as our 'creations', are simply our notes of our observations. This view has been held, in one form or another, by many philosophers of high reputation from Plato onwards [...]

No one has yet discovered any warlike purpose to be served by the theory of numbers or relativity, and it seems unlikely that anyone will do so for many years.