The Man Who Knew Infinity

by Robert Kanigel

  Hardy was the product of the finest British public school education. But he hadn’t come by it in the usual way. There were no viscounts in the Hardy line, no country squires. His family was neither rich nor wellborn—was of humbler lineage, in a sense, than Ramanujan’s: in caste-bound India, Ramanujan was a Brahmin, while in England, where social class counted, Hardy came from schoolteacher stock. Indeed, Hardy would later be offered as an “example of how far the English educational system can bring out the personal powers and capabilities of a man.” His intellect was so luminous, he was marked from the start. His success implied a blurring of the traditional British class system, a filtering down into the middle classes of opportunities once largely limited to a thin stratum of society at the top.

  2. HORSESHOE LANE

  In 1896, when Hardy and his new classmates took turns signing the great leather-bound book, with quarter-inch-thick covers, that had been used since 1882 to register each new class at Trinity College, they noted the schools they’d attended previously—Eton, Harrow, Marlborough, and in Hardy’s case, Winchester. But a few students, one or two per page of twenty-six names, wrote in no school at all but only “private tutor,” or just “private,” in the space provided. It was in this sense, then, that Eton, Harrow, and Winchester were “public” schools, not private. Though many went back centuries, public schools as a powerful social institution had blossomed only in the wake of reforms achieved by Thomas Arnold at the Rugby School in the early part of the century. By Hardy’s time they were the de rigueur means for fashioning the bodies, minds, characters (and accents) of upper-class boys.

  But England, all during Queen Victoria’s sixty-four-year reign, was changing. Newly prosperous farmers and tradesmen could hardly send their sons to Eton and Harrow yet were not content, either, with the bare-bones grammar school education afforded the poor. The 1850s and 1860s saw much debate about how best to accommodate this new middle class and the establishment of new schools to serve them.

  One was Cranleigh School, located in the county southwest of London known as Surrey. “While the upper class [enjoy] the great public schools, and much has been done and still continues to be done to improve the education of the lower orders, the provision for the sons of farmers, and others engaged in commercial pursuits is so inadequate that the labourer’s son often receives a better education than the son of his employer.” So advised the school’s prospectus at its founding in 1863. Then still called Surrey County School, it aimed to redress this imbalance and, in its early years, did: of 113 boys entering around 1880, for example, 55 were the sons of tradesmen, 20 of clerks, 14 of farmers.

  In 1871, taking up the post of assistant master, teaching geography and drawing, was twenty-nine-year-old Isaac Hardy, who had earlier taught at a grammar school in Lincolnshire. Three years later, the school awarded him an extra fifty pounds per year—probably more than half again as much as he then earned; he was getting married, and would be living off school premises. In January 1875, Sophia Hall, three years younger than he, and then senior mistress at the Lincoln Diocesan Training College, became his wife. Little more than a year later, she was pregnant, and on February 7, 1877 she gave birth to Godfrey Harold Hardy. Two years later, he was joined by a sister, Gertrude Edith. There, across the road from the school, on the outskirts of Cranleigh, a village of two thousand souls, they grew up.

  Surrey’s northern border was formed by the River Thames which, further east, meandered through London. In the 1840s, the railroad had begun pushing out from the great metropolis and in forty years had doubled the county’s population, to 342,000; by the yardstick of the centuries, that was breakneck growth. But in Cranleigh, at the other end of the county, things changed more slowly. True, the railroad had in 1865 left Cranleigh just a quick forty miles, by the Guildford and Horsham branch of the Brighton Railway, from London. And rich industrialists had begun to buy farms here and build new homes on them. But during Hardy’s youth, the rolling countryside around Cranleigh remained largely unspoiled, a peaceful tableau of dirt roads, windmills, old manors, and thatched-roof cottages.

  Hardy’s parents lived midst the old Surrey charm, but were not of it, having moved there from the other side of London, 150 miles away. They had had no money for a university education. Isaac Hardy’s father had been a laborer and foundryman. Sophia’s, once a turnkey at the county jail, was a baker at the time of her marriage. But both were bright, sought something better in life—and, as schoolteachers, had found a niche in the humbler reaches of the academic world.

  Isaac Hardy, as C. P. Snow pictured him, was “a gentle, indulgent, somewhat ineffectual man with more than a touch of the White Knight about him.” He was probably a happy man as well, with a refined aesthetic sense and a buoyant attitude toward life. He was the leading tenor in the school choir and, soon after coming to Cranleigh, was giving twice-a-week singing lessons. He edited the school magazine, played football (soccer, to Americans), was active in fraternal organizations, was a member of the Royal Geographic Society. When he died, at age fifty-nine, he was earnestly and sincerely mourned, the shops along High Street closed, their blinds drawn. He was “one of those rare and precious souls,” the headmaster would say, who “never uttered an unkind word, never pained any living being, never had an enemy.” You might chalk it up to inflated Victorian sentimentalism except for a photograph of him, taken when Harold was a child. It shows a man with sunny eyes, thinning hair, and the kind of thick beard that can make a man seem forbidding; on Isaac Hardy, though, it looks as welcoming as it does on Santa Claus.

  The grim formality Victorian photographers more normally found in their subjects returns, however, in a portrait of his wife taken in Cranleigh at about the same time. In it, Sophia Hall Hardy wears an ornate, embroidered dress, her hair combed and piled back onto her head. The small lips, turned down a little at the corners, the startled look in the eyes, would reappear in her son. She was, like Ramanujan’s mother, a pious woman. Sundays, she would drag Harold and sister Gertrude to church two or three times. When she left the Lincoln Diocesan College in December 1874 to get married, the school thanked her for the “high religious tone, and consistent Christian conduct” with which she had influenced her students over the past four years; for the good performance of her students in arithmetic; and for “the wise combination of firmness and kindness displayed … in the management of the Students, together with the quietness with which she has maintained her authority over them.” Altogether, it is hard not to think that Sophia was a stern, upright, surpassingly competent woman.

  Like her husband, she had a taste for cultural pursuits. She taught piano. She attended concerts—like a performance of Handel’s Messiah, held at the school, when Harold was one. As schoolteachers, embracing a world of Art and Learning, both she and Isaac had transcended their roots. And now as parents, proud of the station in life they’d reached, they approached their own children’s education with the utmost earnestness and care.

  And the sensibilities they hoped to bequeath, at least the intellectual ones, took.

  • • •

  In May 1891, Gertrude would enter St. Catherine’s School, Cranleigh’s sister school, about five miles up the road in Bramley. There, she excelled, earning prize certificates in drawing and Latin. In 1903, after earning a B.A. from the University of London, she returned to her alma mater as art mistress, remaining there most of the rest of her life. In 1926, she became editor of the school magazine, which she filled with poetry, stories, and essays better by far than anything that small had a right to expect. Her editorials were graceful. Her own poems, many of them rich with literary and scholarly allusion, were suffused with an extravagant comfort in, and love of, the whole world of learning. In this uncharacteristic attempt at doggerel, she swiped at the self-satisfied ignorance she found among some students:

  There is a girl I can’t abide.

  Her name? I’ll be discreet.

  I feel I’d need some savoir dire

  Should
I her parents meet!

  …

  She says “I never could do Maths.

  When Daddy was at school

  He could not add!” I’d love to say

  “Then Daddy was a fool!”

  “In dictée I got minus two;

  There’s not a verb I know;

  I always write the future tense

  Of ‘rego,’ ‘regĕbo.’

  “But then my Mother cannot write

  Or speak a foreign tongue.”

  Sweet maid, how much the world had gained

  If they had both died young!”

  Whatever Mr. and Mrs. Hardy laid on their children, it must have come in massive doses, relentlessly administered, to have sired a poem like that. Indeed, the Hardys held firm theories about education, quite definite ideas about raising children that moved Snow to call them “a little obsessive.” Harold and his sister had no governess; a nurse taught them to read and write. They had relatively few books, but those they did have were always “good” ones; as a boy, Harold would read Don Quixote and Gulliver’s Travels to his sister. They were never allowed to play with broken toys. It was as if there were an invisible standard of integrity and excellence to which they were invited to compare everything—and to sternly discard or reject anything that failed to measure up.

  When Hardy was two, he was writing down numbers into the millions, a common marker of mathematical talent. At church, he’d busy himself seeking the factors in the hymn numbers: Hymn 84? That’s 2 × 2 × 3 × 7. At school, young Hardy apparently never sat in a regular math class, but was rather coached privately by Eustace Thomas Clarke, who presided over the school’s mathematics instruction. Clarke came to Cranleigh fresh from St. John’s College, Cambridge, where, as a “Wrangler,” he’d ranked among the top mathematics students. Coupled to his mathematical abilities was uncommon energy and drive, and he won a reputation for instilling those traits in his students.

  It was not just mathematics in which Hardy was gifted, but all to which he took his hand. Yet a fragility, a diffidence, sometimes undermined it. He was painfully shy and self-conscious and could scarcely bear going up before the whole school to accept a prize. Sometimes he’d give wrong answers to ensure he wouldn’t have to do so. “Over-delicate,” his friend Snow described him later. “He seems to have been born with three skins too few.”

  So was his sister, whom one of her students would describe as “shy and diffident.” When she entered St. Catherine’s School, Gertrude would recall, “I was very shy, and the atmosphere in which I had been brought up was a poor preparation for a girls’ school of that age.” Whatever made for that “atmosphere,” it gripped both children. Neither ever married. Both spent their lives in academic settings. Both emerged as delicate, enchanted by intellect, and—apparently reacting to their mother’s zealotry—contemptuous of religion.

  Hardy was an atheist even as a boy. Once, as he and a clergyman walked in the fog, they saw a boy with a string and stick. The clergyman likened God’s presence to a kite, felt but unseen. In the fog, he told young Hardy, “you cannot see the kite flying, but you feel the pull on the string.” But in fog, Hardy thought, there is no wind and no kite can fly. Gertrude felt much the same. Once, as an old woman confined to a nursing home, she was asked her religious preference. She replied “Mohammedan,” bewailed the want of a mosque close by, even set about trying to locate a prayer rug to enhance the deception.

  When in the 1920s a photo was taken of the faculty at St. Catherine’s School, all twenty or so stared straight ahead into the camera. All, that is, save for “Gertie,” as she was known, who gazed off camera to her left, leaving her almost in profile, her left side hidden. Gertrude lost her eye as a child, when Harold, playing carelessly with a cricket bat, struck her; she had to wear a glass eye for the rest of her life. The incident, however, did nothing to disrupt their sibling closeness, and may even have enhanced it. They were devoted to one another all their lives, kept in close touch almost as twins are said to, and for many years shared an apartment in London.

  • • •

  In 1880, when Hardy was three, the board of Cranleigh School approved taking twenty-four of the youngest students and boarding them separately in what had been the sick house across the road, thus freeing up places in the main school and increasing its income. Running it would be Mr. and Mrs. Hardy, helped by a governess. This preparatory school (which may have existed in some form earlier) was a distinct operation, kept separate in the school’s account books. In 1881, Mrs. Hardy was paid 281 pounds, 12 shillings, from which, presumably, she met the House’s operating expenses.

  The House, as the preparatory school came to be known, was a sprawling, barrackslike affair with a double-gabled roof that stood up the slope from Horseshoe Lane opposite the school. At least around 1881, when Hardy was four, the family lived a few steps down from it toward the road, in a small, two-story brick semidetached house, trimmed with the black and red scalloped clay tiling ubiquitous in Surrey since the seventeenth century. “Mt. Pleasant” the little house was grandly called. It had two small bedrooms on the second floor, and a low-ceilinged sitting room and kitchen, dominated by a big brick fireplace, on the first. From the sitting room, you could see the clock tower of the school across the road and the rose window of its chapel.

  Around 1881, census records tell, the house was home not just to Harold and his mother, father, and sister, but also to Eliza Denton, thirty years old, who helped Mrs. Hardy at the House; twenty-two-year-old Catherine Maynard, who may have been the children’s nurse; Alice Lee, an eighteen-year-old servant; and another servant, Laura Chandler, a widowed thirty-eight-year-old—eight people, in all, packed into what amounted to a cottage. By today’s standards, it must have made for a tight squeeze. But on the other side of the fireplace, in a mirror image of the Hardy house, lived a still larger family—an agricultural laborer and his wife, her father, two sons already at work as laborer and ploughboy, and six other children ranging from eleven down to four months.

  Indeed, with only two children, the house might have seemed to Mr. and Mrs. Hardy scandalously empty—making it natural, with the children still young and the family’s finances precarious, to rent out sleeping space, probably in the basement, to local servants, some of whom may have worked at the school. During the day, presumably, the servants would scatter to their jobs, Mr. Hardy to school, and Mrs. Hardy to minister to her flock at the House, leaving Harold and his sister with Miss Maynard.

  The Hardys were better off than many others who lived along Horseshoe Lane—farmers and laborers with five or six children, most of whom had lived their whole lives in Cranleigh or nearby towns like Alfold, Woking, or Dorking. But Isaac’s modest position left them by no means flush. The school’s headmaster (principal) made a thousand pounds a year. But at a time when workmen made sixty or seventy pounds a year and an upper-middle-class person three hundred, the school’s second master made only a hundred. Assistant master Hardy, it is safe to say, made even less.

  The Hardy children, someone later wrote, were brought up in “a typical Victorian nursery”; typical is the key word. When he was six, Harold was photographed in a standard-issue Victorian sailor suit, with a bow tie. He grew up on a road that a few years before had been little more than a mud track. His hometown, spreading out haphazardly from its little High Street of gabled, half-timbered shops, was unprepossessing. Meanwhile, the school to which his family had such close ties sent a kindred message: its modest red brick buildings, situated at the end of a sloping driveway up from Horseshoe Lane, were handsome enough, but bore none of the weight of history and tradition boasted by older public schools.

  Indeed, the atmosphere at Cranleigh School differed from anything Hardy would meet later. It was not there to groom England’s elite. It was ordinary and unpretentious, shot through with a kind of youthful freshness. One visitor in 1875 noted that “Cranleigh boys may wander where they please, and this freedom is characteristic of the establishment through
out.” Teachers played on school teams until 1888. Absent were the rigid hierarchies of the older public schools, the tight restrictions on student behavior. Boys went off on their own, smoked pipes, hung out behind the gym.

  Snow wrote that Hardy enjoyed a fortunate childhood, “enlightened, cultivated, highly literate… . He knew what privilege meant, and he knew that he had possessed it.” Indeed, at home, he grew up with an emphasis on intellect and learning that, in ages past, only the aristocracy enjoyed. But at school, his teachers were mostly not public school boys and everyone was aware of being not Eton, not Harrow, not Winchester. And so, if “privilege” it was, it was of a rare and perhaps ideal sort—in circumstances at once economically modest and culturally enriched, like the immigrant Jews of two generations ago, say, or the immigrant Asians of today. And if Hardy grew up, as he did, insistent on intellectual excellence, yet sensitive to those socially scorned or economically unlucky, Cranleigh may have helped make him that way.

  • • •

  In July 1889, J. T. Ward, a fellow of St. John’s College, Cambridge, reported to the headmaster at Cranleigh the results of his yearly examinations of students in the school’s upper forms. Students at Cranleigh advanced through each “form,” or grade, based largely on merit, not age; indeed, one year among the school’s 347 boys was a sixth-former who was twenty. Hardy reached the sixth form at twelve. But though five years younger than most other boys, reported Ward, he surpassed most of them in algebra, geometry, and trigonometry. A much older boy came in first that year. But Hardy came next, “far ahead of the third boy, although he has read [studied] no Conic Sections yet, and a very little Mechanics [the science, not the trade]; taking into account his present age, I am confident,” wrote Ward, “that he ought to distinguish himself greatly in the future.”