> Forgive me if I have no sympathy for current mathematicians who think this way. It's a pretty ugly kind of arrogance.

Thankfully, very few mathematicians share Hardy's opinion, just as very few share his opinion that "mathematics is a young man's game" (and indeed we now have prizes like the Abel Prize with no age limit).

In fact, many of the greatest mathematicians throughout history have taken exposition very seriously, e.g. Euclid, Euler, Lagrange, Cauchy, Dirichlet, Kolmogorov etc. all wrote textbooks. Many mathematicians today carry on that tradition of taking exposition seriously and write books and freely share their lecture notes.

So we should not take Hardy's opinion as representing the opinion of all mathematicians or even most mathematicians. In fact, Hardy's statement is somewhat self-contradictory since he himself wrote several expository books (e.g. "A Course of Pure Mathematics").

FALSE.

A first rate mind communes with mathematics not matter terrestrial. An Uber-Erdos entering to lecture is indifferent to the auditorium as well as it's contents. He's at the board silently communicating new mathematics. Not for himself, not for you, but for mathematics.

Is that how he himself felt when trying to figure out proofs by Ramanujan? Nevertheless what a shitty view

It turns out your an expendable commodity, and my computer system is predicting that society will profit from your annihilation, really sorry about that and I hope there's no hard feelings.

>> Some people told themselves they were the pinnacle, the first-rate mind, as opposed to all the second-rater.

Wait, who are those people? Who is that Hardy and what did he really say? What did he really mean? Who else said or meant the same things?

Who are you criticising, exactly?