Godfrey Harold Hardy

See also: Hardy

Godfrey Harold Hardy (February 7th 1877 - February 1st 1947) is a British mathematician of foreground, prize winner of the Médaille Sylvester in 1940 and Médaille Copley in 1947, known for its works in Théorie of the numbers and analyzes. The not-mathematicians especially know it for two things:

  • has Mathematician' S Apology , its Essai of 1940 on the Esthétique of mathematics with certain personal contents - which are perhaps best testimony on the thought of a mathematician to work.
  • Its particular relation like mentor starting from 1914 with the Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan. Hardy immediately recognized the unclassable genius of Ramanujan. However, all separated these two mathematicians: Hardy, a rigorous and precise British atheist, and Ramanujan, a mystical and intuitive Indian, but they became friendly and colleagues. In an interview with Paul Erdős, when this one required of him which was its greater contribution to mathematics, Hardy answered without hesitation that it was the discovery of Ramanujan.

Biography

After its schooling with Winchester, Hardy entered to Cambridge after having been fourth with the examination of the Tripos. It belonged to the Secret society of the Cambridge Apostles.

Years later, Hardy sought to remove the Tripos system as it estimated that became an end in itself that to be means at an end. Hardy is also credited with its reform in British mathematics in their having brought the Rigueur, which had a characteristic of French mathematics previously, Swiss and German. The British mathematicians were largely in a tradition of Mathématiques applied, in the line of the reputation of Isaac Newton; Hardy was in harmony with the systems design course , dominant method in France, and promoted in an aggressive way its design of the pure Mathématiques, in particular against the Hydrodynamique which was a big part of mathematics of Cambridge.

Hardy was Professor Sadleirien with Cambridge of 1931 with 1942; it left Cambridge to take the Chaire of geometry Savilian in Oxford following the consequences of the business Bertrand Russell during the First World War. Since 1911, it collaborated with J.E. Littlewood, on a wide work of analyzes and of analytical Théorie of the numbers. This contribution (among quantity of others) made quantitative progress on the Problème of Waring, as an element of the Méthode of the circle of Hardy-Littlewood, and that became known. In the theory of the Prime numbers they proved also results and some conditional Résultats notable. This was a major factor in the development of the theory of the numbers like a system of Conjecture S; for example, the first and the Second conjecture of Hardy-Littlewood. It is also known to have formulated the Principe of Hardy-Weinberg, a simple principle on the Génétique of the populations, independently of Wilhelm Weinberg in 1908.

Socially, it was associated with the Groupe Bloomsbury and the Apôtres of Cambridge and was an avid fan of Cricket. According to testimonys of those which knew it best (his/her collaborator of long time J.E. Littlewood, its student Alan Turing, and his/her friend Charles Percy Snow). Hardy was homosexual by orientation. One did not know in Hardy of boyfriend or boyfriend, so that it was apparently asexual, “ homosexual not a practitioner ”, according to the expression of Littlewood. Hardy never married, and towards the end of its life, it is his/her sister who dealt with him.

Anecdote

Like Paul Erdős, Hardy, firmly atheistic, made fun Être Supreme, even if it doubted his existence. At the time of a crossing agitated in boat of Scandinavia to the the United Kingdom, Hardy, which detested the voyages, quickly dispatched a postcard with a colleague to announce to him that it had shown the Hypothèse of Riemann. He thought that God, that he held for his “ enemy close friend ”, was not going to let it die and thus make accept the mathematical community which he had shown important a Conjecture of the theory of the Prime numbers.

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