February 7
On this date in 1877,
Godfrey Harold Hardy
was born in Surry, England. Hardy’s parents were teachers, and he showed
mathematical ability very early on in life. He attended Winchester
College, a traditional British boarding school, for secondary education,
where he was awarded a scholarship for mathematics. He entered Trinity
College, Cambridge in 1896, where he studied mathematics. Continuing at
Cambridge and independently studying Continental mathematics, he earned
his M.A. (at the time, the highest degree available) in 1903. He worked
as a lecturer at Cambridge from 1909 until 1919, when he left for
Oxford, where he took the Savilian Chair of Geometry. In
1931, he became Sadlerian Professor at Cambridge, a position he held
until 1941. Hardy never married and had no known romantic attachments;
he himself described his mentorship of the young Indian mathematician
Srinivasa Ramanujan as “the one romantic incident of my life.” His
sister cared for him in his old age.
Hardy helped to bring a
new tradition of pure mathematics to England, which had remained largely
applied since the time of Isaac Newton. He worked to bring pure
mathematical rigor and proofs to Cambridge, helping to reform the old
curriculum which featured many practical problems in hydrodynamics.
Although Hardy’s work at the time was purely theoretical, it has since
been used to
solve many practical problems. Many of his contributions were in the
field of mathematical analysis and analytic number theory. Hardy was a
life-long atheist, refusing to enter a chapel even for funerals or for
elections of college officials.
D. 1947.
1. To prove the Riemann hypothesis;
2. To make a brilliant play in a crucial cricket match;
3. To prove the nonexistence of God;
4. To be the first man atop Mount Everest;
5. To be proclaimed the first president of the U.S.S.R., Great Britain, and Germany; and
6. To murder Mussolini.
—A
list of New Year’s resolutions sent by Hardy to a friend in the 1940’s,
according to Paul Hoffman, The Man Who Loved Only Numbers (1998)
Compiled by Eleanor Wroblewski -
www.ffrf.org
No comments:
Post a Comment