Littlewood's Miscellany (1986)

Littlewood's Miscellany is a revised and expanded version of A Mathematician's Miscellany, published 1953.

• A good mathematical joke is better, and better mathematics, than a dozen mediocre papers.
  • "Introduction to A Mathematician's Miscellany", p. 24.

• 'The surprising thing about this paper is that a man who could write it--would.'
  • Note quotation marks: Littlewood is repeating a joke without attribution. "Cross-purposes, Unconscious Assumptions, Howlers, Misprints, etc.", p. 59.

• I read in the proof-sheets of Hardy on Ramanujan: 'As someone said, each of the positive integers was one of his personal friends.' My reaction was, 'I wonder who said that; I wish I had.' In the next proof-sheets I read (what now stands): 'It was Littlewood who said...' (What had happened was that Hardy had received the remark in silence and with a poker face, and I wrote it off as a dud....)
  • "Cross-purposes, Unconscious Assumptions, Howlers, Misprints, etc.", p. 61.

• I recall once saying that when I had given the same lecture several times I couldn't help feeling that they really ought to know it by now.
  • "Academic Life", p. 135.