Birthday of G.H. Hardy (1877) — A Mathematician's Apology

Godfrey Harold Hardy was born in Cranleigh, Surrey on February 7, 1877. He transformed British mathematics from an applied tradition into a centre of pure mathematical rigour, and he wrote A Mathematician's Apology (1940) — the most eloquent defence of pure mathematics ever written. Hardy discovered Ramanujan through a letter in 1913 and declared: 'I had never seen anything in the least like them.' Their collaboration, between the Cambridge don and the self-taught clerk from Madras, produced the Hardy-Ramanujan theorem on the number of prime factors of a typical integer and co-founded analytic number theory. Hardy famously said that mathematics is not merely useful — it is beautiful, and beauty is enough.