Godfrey Harold Hardy FRS[1] (7 February 1877 – 1 December 1947)[2] was an English mathematician, known for his achievements in number theory and mathematical analysis.

[9] His father was Bursar and Art Master at Cranleigh School; his mother had been a senior mistress at Lincoln Training College for teachers.

He and his sister Gertrude "Gertie" Emily Hardy (1878–1963) were brought up by their educationally enlightened parents in a typical Victorian nursery attended by a nurse.

He then was tutored by Augustus Love, who recommended him to read Camille Jordan's Cours d'analyse, which taught him for the first time "what mathematics really meant".

[13] Hardy cited as his most important influence his independent study of Cours d'analyse de l'École Polytechnique by the French mathematician Camille Jordan, through which he became acquainted with the more precise mathematics tradition in continental Europe.

When his Prize Fellowship expired in 1906 he was appointed to the Trinity staff as a lecturer in mathematics, where teaching six hours per week left him time for research.

[14][15] Hardy read the letter in the morning, suspected it was a crank or a prank, but thought it over and realized in the evening that it was likely genuine because "great mathematicians are commoner than thieves or humbugs of such incredible skill".

[17] In the aftermath of the Bertrand Russell affair during World War I, in 1919 he left Cambridge to take the Savilian Chair of Geometry (and thus become a Fellow of New College[18]) at Oxford.

He died suddenly one early morning while listening to his sister read out from a book of the history of Cambridge University cricket.

[17] From 1911, he collaborated with John Edensor Littlewood, in extensive work in mathematical analysis and analytic number theory.

[30]However, aside from formulating the Hardy–Weinberg principle in population genetics, his famous work on integer partitions with his collaborator Ramanujan, known as the Hardy–Ramanujan asymptotic formula, has been widely applied in physics to find quantum partition functions of atomic nuclei (first used by Niels Bohr) and to derive thermodynamic functions of non-interacting Bose–Einstein systems.

Hardy regards as "pure" the kinds of mathematics that are independent of the physical world, but also considers some "applied" mathematicians, such as the physicists Maxwell and Einstein, to be among the "real" mathematicians, whose work "has permanent aesthetic value" and "is eternal because the best of it may, like the best literature, continue to cause intense emotional satisfaction to thousands of people after thousands of years."

[33][34] Socially, Hardy was associated with the Bloomsbury Group and the Cambridge Apostles; G. E. Moore, Bertrand Russell and J. M. Keynes were friends.

[17] Around the age of 20, he decided that he did not believe in God, which proved a minor issue as attending the chapel was compulsory at Cambridge University.

[17] Paul Hoffman writes that "His concerns were wide-ranging, as evidenced by six New Year's resolutions he set in a postcard to a friend: (1) prove the Riemann hypothesis; (2) make 211 not out in the fourth innings of the last Test Match at the Oval; (3) find an argument for the nonexistence of God which shall convince the general public; (4) be the first man at the top of Mount Everest; (5) be proclaimed the first president of the U. S. S. R. of Great Britain and Germany; and (6) murder Mussolini.

[36]Hardy is a key character, played by Jeremy Irons, in the 2015 film The Man Who Knew Infinity, based on the biography of Ramanujan with the same title.

[37] Hardy is a major character in David Leavitt's historical fiction novel The Indian Clerk (2007), which depicts his Cambridge years and his relationship with John Edensor Littlewood and Ramanujan.