Who is g.h. hardy

In fact for most of his life his day, at least during the cricket season, would consist of breakfast during which he read The Times studying the cricket scores with great interest. After breakfast he would work on his own mathematical researches from 9 o'clock till 1 o'clock. Then, after a light lunch, he would walk down to the university cricket ground to watch a game. In the late afternoon he would walk slowly back to his rooms in College.

There he took dinner, which he followed with a glass of wine. When cricket was not in season, it was the Australian cricket scores he would read in The Times and he would play real tennis in the afternoons.

Hardy was known for his eccentricities. He could not endure having his photograph taken and only five snapshots are known to exist. He also hated mirrors and his first action on entering any hotel room was to cover any mirror with a towel. He always played an amusing game of trying to fool God which is also rather strange since he claimed all his life not be believe in God. For example, during a trip to Denmark he sent back a postcard claiming that he had proved the Riemann hypothesis.

He reasoned that God would not allow the boat to sink on the return journey and give him the same fame that Fermat had achieved with his " last theorem ". Another example of his trying to fool God was when he went to cricket matches he would take what he called his "anti-God battery". This consisted of thick sweaters, an umbrella, mathematical papers to referee, student examination scripts etc. His theory was that God would think that he expected rain to come so that he could then get on with his work.

Since Hardy thought that God would then have the sun shine all day to spite him, he would be able to enjoy the cricket in perfect sunshine. He had remained remarkably youthful in both mind and body until when, at the age of 62 , he had a heart attack. His remarkable mental powers began to leave him and sports which he had loved to participate in up till then became impossible.

He was filled with anger that Europe had again entered the lunacy of war. However, Hardy had one further gift to leave to the world, namely A mathematicians apology which has inspired many towards mathematics. Hardy's book A mathematicians apology was written in It is one of the most vivid descriptions of how a mathematician thinks and the pleasure of mathematics. But the book is more, as Snow writes in [ 6 ] :- A mathematicians apology is, if read with the textual attention it deserves, a book of haunting sadness.

Yes, it is witty and sharp with intellectual high spirits: yes, the crystalline clarity and candour are still there: yes, it is the testament of a creative artist. But it is also, in an understated stoical fashion, a passionate lament for creative powers that used to be and that will never come again. I know nothing like it in the language: partly because most people with the literary gift to express such a lament don't come to feel it: it is very rare for a writer to realise, with the finality of truth, that he is absolutely finished.

The following quotation from A mathematicians apology [ 5 ] gives a clear idea of Hardy's thoughts on mathematics:- The mathematician's patterns, like those of the painter's or the poet's, must be beautiful, the ideas, like the colours or the words, must fit together in a harmonious way. There is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics. By the time the war ended in Hardy's health was failing fast. He longed to be creative again, for that was all that really mattered to him in life, but he knew that his creativity was gone and that he became very depressed.

By he could only get around by taking taxi rides, a few steps would make him short of breath. In early summer of he tried to take his own life by taking a large dose of barbiturates.

He took so many, however, that he was sick and survived. Snow writes [ 6 ] :- In the Evelyn nursing home, Hardy was lying in bed. As a touch of farce, he had a black eye. Vomiting from the drugs, he had hit his head on the lavatory basin. He was self-mocking. He had made a mess of it. He talked a little, nearly every time I saw him, about death. He wanted it.

He didn't fear it: what was there to fear in nothingness? His hard intellectual stoicism had come back. He would not try to kill himself again.

From an early age natural affinity for mathematics was palpable in Hardy. He wrote down numbers up to millions when he was barely a toddler. When taken to church he would factorize the hymns.

It would not be wrong to call him a mathematical prodigy. He attended Cranleigh School and upon his remarkable mathematical performance he was offered a scholarship to Winchester College. Afterwards, he was enrolled into Trinity College, Cambridge. However, later he tried abolishing the Tripos system which he felt had lost its purpose. Moreover, he became a member of an elite intellectual secret society, the Cambridge Apostles.

He was awarded a fellowship when he cleared the second Tripos test. Hardy was interested in pure mathematics and its topics including Diophantine analysis, distribution of primes, Fourier series, the Riemann zeta function, and the summation of divergent series.

The seriousness that Hardy brought to mathematics was pretty uncommon at that time. From formulation of essays to bringing in new techniques in various mathematical methods, Hardy proved himself to be a highly significant figure of the field. Hardy never married but did have a few relationships. He was a very shy person who did not like to be center of attention or meeting new people. He was also known to be very cold and peculiar at times.

Being a bright student he was awarded many times but he detested receiving any kind of appreciation in front of everyone. He was member of various societies later on in life such as the Cambridge Apostles and the Bloomsbury group. He was also briefly involved in politics not as an activist but he did take part in the Union of Democratic Control in the First World War. His students however had insight to his softer side.