Godfrey Harold Hardy was one of the foremost mathematicians in England during the early part of the 20th century. He was primarily a pure mathematician, specializing in branches of mathematics that study the behavior of numbers (such as number theory and analysis). He also made important contributions to areas of applied mathematics, and is known for formulating the Hardy-Weinberg law of population genetics. He taught at both Cambridge and Oxford and published over 350 research papers, either alone or in collaboration with other mathematicians--most notably John Edensor Littlewood and S. I. Ramanujan.

Born on February 7, 1877, in Cranleigh, England, Hardy was the elder of two children of Isaac and Sophia Hall Hardy. Both his parents came from poor families and were unable to afford university education for themselves, but they were people with a taste for intellectual and cultural pursuits and had made a place for themselves as schoolteachers. Hardy's...