G. H. Hardy

Godfrey Harold Hardy (1877 to 1947), always known as G. H. Hardy, was an English pure mathematician born at Cranleigh in Surrey, where his father was bursar and art master at the school. At Cambridge he changed his coach to A. E. H. Love, who set him reading Jordan's Cours d'analyse, and he was placed fourth wrangler in the Mathematical Tripos of 1898, became a fellow of Trinity in 1900 and shared a Smith's prize in 1901. His early papers on the convergence of series and integrals, and his book A Course of Pure Mathematics of 1908, which brought rigorous analysis into English undergraduate teaching, made his reputation. From 1911 he began a collaboration with J. E. Littlewood that lasted 35 years, and in 1913 he recognised the genius of Srinivasa Ramanujan from a letter, bringing him to Cambridge where they wrote five remarkable papers together. Hardy was Savilian professor of geometry at Oxford from 1919 and returned to the Sadleirian chair at Cambridge in 1931. His interests ran across Diophantine analysis, divergent series, Fourier series, the Riemann zeta function and the distribution of primes. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1910 and received its Royal, Sylvester and Copley medals. He died in Cambridge on 1 December 1947.