Hardy, Godfrey Harold (1877-1947)

English mathematician whose research was at a very advanced level in the fields of pure mathematics known as analysis and number theory. His Course in Pure Mathematics (1908) revolutionized the teaching of mathematics at senior school and university levels.

Hardy was born in Cranleigh, Surrey, and studied at Cambridge. He became professor at Oxford in 1919, but returned in 1931 to Cambridge.

Hardy's researches included such topics as the evaluation of difficult integrals and the treatment of awkward series of algebraic terms. Among his successes in number theory was a new proof of the prime number theorem. Other problems on which he worked were the ways in which numbers could be partitioned into simpler numbers, ‘decomposed’ into squares and cubes, and so on. Hardy also worked on the question of whether every even number is the sum of two prime numbers. (This is still an unsolved problem.)

Hardy was the sole or joint author of several books, including An Introduction to the Theory of Numbers, Inequalities, and Divergent Series.