G. H. Hardy

G. H. Hardy was the leading English mathematician of the first half of the twentieth century, a pure mathematician who worked on number theory and analysis, collaborated with Littlewood for thirty-five years, and discovered Ramanujan from a letter. A Mathematician’s Apology, written in 1940 when he was sixty-two and believed his creative life over, is the defence of mathematics as an art pursued for its beauty rather than its use, and the saddest book, C. P. Snow said, ever written about creative power. He was a cricket enthusiast, an atheist who carried on a running feud with God, and a pacifist in both wars.