Godfrey Harold Hardy (1877-1947) was an English mathematician, educated at Winchester and Trinity College, Cambridge. He held the Savilian chair of geometry at Oxford from 1919 to 1931 and the Sadleirian chair of pure mathematics at Cambridge from 1931 to 1942. Working largely in analysis and number theory, he carried on a long collaboration with J. E. Littlewood and, after receiving his letter in 1913, brought the self-taught Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan to Cambridge in 1914. His name is also attached to the Hardy-Weinberg principle in population genetics (1908).
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“No mathematician should ever allow himself to forget that mathematics, more than any other art or science, is a young man's game.”
A Mathematician's Apology is a short book of twenty-nine numbered sections in which the Cambridge mathematician G. H. Hardy, at sixty-two and conscious that his creative powers had faded, sets out to justify a life spent on pure mathematics. Cambridge University Press published it in 1940.
