GODFREY HAROLD HARDY

Hardy, born in Cranleigh, survey, England, was the older of tow children of Issac Hardy and Sophia Hall Hardy.His father was the geography and drawing master at the Cranleigh School and also gave singing lessons played soccer.His mother gave piano lesson and helped run a boardinghouse for young students. Hardy's parents were devoted to their children's education. Hardy demonstrated his numerical ability at the early age of tow when he began writing down numbers into the millions.He had a private mathematics tutor rather then attending regular classes at the Cranleigh School. He moved to Winchester College, a private high school,when he was 13 and was awarded a scholarship. He excelled in his studies and demonstrated a strong interest in mathematics. He entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1896 a scholarship and won several prizes during his time there, graduating in 1899.Hardy held the position of lecturer in mathematics at Trinity college at Cambridge University from 1906 to 1919, when he was appointed to the Sullivan chair of geometry at Oxford.He held become unhappy with Cambridge over the dismissal of the famous philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russel from Trinity for antiwar activities and did not like a heavy load of administrative duties.In 1931 he returned to Cambridge as the Sadleirian professor of pure mathematics, where he remind until his retirement in 1942.He was a pure mathematician and held an elitist view of mathematics, hoping that his research could never be applied.Ironically, he is perhaps best known one of the developers of the Hardy-Weinberg law, predicts patterns of inheritance.His work in this area appeared as a letter to the journal Science in which he used simple algebraic ideas to the demonstrate error in an article on genetics.Hardy worked primarily in number theory,exploring such topics as the Riemann zeta function, Fourier series, and the distribution of primes.He made many important contributions to many important problems , such as Waring's problems about representing positive integers as sums of kth powers and the problem of representing odd integers as whom he wrote more then 100 papers, and the famous Indian mathematical prodigy Srinivasa Ramanujan.His collaboration with Littlewood wood led to the joke that there were only three important English mathematician at the time,Hardy,Littlewood Hardy-Littlewood,although some people though that Hardy had invented a fictitious person,because Littlewood was seldom seen outside Cambridge.Hardy had the wisdom of recognizing Ramanujan's genius from unconventional but extremely creative writings Ramanujan sent him, while other mathematicians fail to see the genius.Hardy brought Ramanujan to Cambridge and collaborated on important join papers, establishing new results on the number of positions of an integer.Hardy was interested in mathematics education,and his book A Course of Pure Mathematics had profound effect on undergraduate instruction in mathematics in the first half of the twentieth century.Hardy also wrote A Mathematician's Apology, in which he gives his answer to the questions of whether it is worthwhile to devote one's life to the study of mathematics.It presents Hardy's view of what mathematics is and what a mathematician does.

Hardy had a strong interest in sports.He was an avid cricket fan and followed scores closely.One peculiar trait he had was that he did not like his picture taken(only five snapshots are known) and disliked mirrors, covering them with towels immediately upon entering a hotel room.