The Man Who Knew Infinity

by Robert Kanigel

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “He … looks a babe of three.” Michael Holroyd, Strachey: A Critical Biography, vol. 1, The Unknown Years (London: Heinemann, 1967), 516, footnote. Hardy was sometimes refused beer. Bollobás, Littlewood’s Miscellany, 120. His college rooms had no mirrors. Snow, Apology foreword, 16. See also Alexanderson, 65.

  “Red Indian bronze.” Snow, Apology foreword, 9.

  Hardy took six pages to attack the plan. Letter, Hardy to Jackson, 9 November 1910. Trinity College.

  enthusiasms, peeves, and idiosyncrasies. Titchmarsh, 452.

  “There’s a match due to begin.” Collins, 27.

  leaving the benighted. M. H. A. Newman, in BBC obituary. Trinity College. Sister read to him about cricket when he died. Snow, Apology foreword, 58. Chapel incident. Ibid., 20.

  “happiest hours of my life.” Snow, Apology foreword, 21.

  would not shake hands. Interview, Mary Cartwright.

  “strange and charming of men.” Woolf, Sowing, 123.

  “the most extravagant and fanatical kind.” Hardy, Collected Papers, 532.

  “the one great permanent happiness of my life.” Letter, Hardy to Thomson, December 1919. Cambridge University.

  He admitted the pro-God position was stronger. Interview, Mary Cartwright.

  “what his real opinions were.” Titchmarsh, 450.

  “more delicate, less padded, finer-nerved.” Snow, Apology foreword, 16.

  “a slightly startled fawn.” Woolf, Sowing, 124.

  “To sit that way.” Alexanderson, 64.

  “personal powers and capabilities.” A. Ostrowski, in Experentia 5 (1949): 131—132.

  Middle-class schools. Cranleigh School Magazine, July 1887, 133, 198. See also Megahey.

  “the labourer’s son.” Megahey, 12.

  55 were the sons of tradesmen. Minutes, Cranleigh School, 29 January 1880.

  Isaac Hardy. Surrey Advertiser and County Times, 7 September 1901; The Cranleighan, 1901, 267–271; Surrey County School Register, 1872, 1; other Cranleigh School records.

  an extra fifty pounds per year. Minutes, Surrey County School, 23 October 1874. rich industrialists. Brandon, 97.

  Genealogy of Hardy’s parents. Information furnished by Robert A. Rankin, Glasgow.

  “with more than a touch of the White Knight.” Snow, Variety of Men, 204.

  singing lessons. Surrey County School Register, Christmas 1872.

  earnestly and sincerely mourned. Surrey Advertiser and County Times, 7 September 1901.

  “rare and precious souls.” The Cranleighan, 1901, 270.

  Sophia Hall Hardy. Information furnished by Robert A. Rankin, Glasgow, through D. H. J. Zebedee, Lincoln Diocesan Training College, 1862–1962. to church two or three times. Interview, Mary Cartwright.

  taught piano. Minutes, Cranleigh School, 29 January 1890.

  Handel concert. Cranleigh School Magazine, July 1878.

  Gertrude Hardy. References to her are scattered through St. Catherine’s School Magazine over more than thirty years.

  “There is a girl I can’t abide.” Gertrude Hardy, “Lines Written Under Provocation,” St. Catherine’s School Magazine (October 1933), 575.

  “a little obsessive.” Snow, Apology foreword, 14.

  Only “good” books. Titchmarsh, 447.

  writing down numbers into the millions. Ibid.

  Eustace Thomas Clarke. Cranleighan, June 1905, 18. Cranleighan, 1937, 120.

  give wrong answers. Snow, Apology foreword, 14.

  “He seems to have been born with three skins too few.” Ibid., 15.

  Gertrude “shy and diffident.” St. Catherine’s School Magazine, obituary, August 1963,6. “A teacher of outstanding ability, she combined keen interest in her brighter pupils and, as I have good reason to remember, boundless patience with the slow. Her reproofs were astringent, but never undeserved. Her scrupulous fairness gave that feeling of security which is so valuable to the young.”

  “I was very shy.” St. Catherine’s School Magazine, October 1938, 229.

  The clergyman and the kite. Stanislaw Ulam, Adventures of a Mathematician (New York: Scribners, 1976), 60.

  Gertrude the “Mohammedan.” Letter, Marjorie Dibden to Robert A. Rankin, 24 November 1983. Robert Rankin.

  lost her eye as a child. Interview, Mary Cartwright.

  Running it would be Mr. and Mrs. Hardy. School Minutes, 29 January 1880. At least around 1881. The census records, obtained at the Guildford Library, are RG 792 97b schedule 153. Hardy is listed as “Godfred.” The records clearly indicate the Hardy house as “Mt. Pleasant,” cottages that still stand. However, school records refer to the twenty-four boys as “at Mr. Hardy’s house,” which could only mean the much larger House. It is conceivable, then, that Mr. and Mrs. Hardy actually lived, along with their children, at the House, while maintaining official residence in the Mt. Pleasant cottage.

  ubiquitous in Surrey since the seventeenth century. Nairn and Pevsner, 14. See also Jekyll, 4.

  low-ceilinged sitting room. Tour of the house. My thanks to its current resident, whose name I failed to record.

  who helped Mrs. Hardy at the House. Sketch of the History of the Surrey County School, 17. to rent out sleeping space. It is unlikely that the servants mentioned in the census records served the Hardy family. Megahey, 16, reports that an upper-middle-class income of five hundred pounds per year was enough to hire three servants. Isaac Hardy made less than one-fifth of that.

  a thousand pounds a year. Megahey, 16.

  second master made only a hundred. Ibid., 17.

  “a typical Victorian nursery.” Titchmarsh, 447.

  little more than a mud track. Megahey, 20.

  “Cranleigh boys may wander where they please.” Ibid., 27.

  “enlightened, cultivated, highly literate.” Snow, Apology foreword, 14.

  a sixth-former who was twenty. Megahey, 31.

  reached the sixth form at twelve. He was placed in the third form at ten. Megahey, 52.

  Ward’s assessment of young Hardy. Cranleigh School Register, Report to the Council of the Surrey County School, 26 July 1889.

  137 boys competed. Sabben-Clare, 54.

  Hardy placed first. Megahey, 52.

  beginning to shed. Ibid., 44.

  “Connel.” Register of Winchester School, courtesy Robert Rankin.

  originally endowed. Dunning and Sheard, 48.

  “gentlemanly rebels and intellectual reformers.” Bishop, 18.

  architectural details. Winchester College: A Guide, school publication, rev. and repr. May 1984.

  “notions.” See, for example, Sabben-Clare, 144; Bishop, 26; Winchester College Notions, “by Three Beetleites” (Winchester: P. & G. Wells, 1904).

  thirty strokes, with a ground-ash stick. Sabben-Clare, 44.

  “Morning Hills.” Ibid., 151.

  circled through the stone-arched walkways. Ibid., 152.

  “Mrs. Dick.” Ibid., 45.

  Cricket. John and Emma Leigh, of Cranleigh, assure me that a foreigner possesses the essential knowledge of cricket when he fully understands the following:

  You have two sides. One out in the field and one in.

  Each man that’s in the side that’s in goes out and when he’s out he comes in and the next man goes in until he’s out.

  When they are all out the side that’s out comes in and the side that’s been in goes out and tries to get those coming in out.

  Sometimes you get men still in and not out.

  When both sides have been in and out including the not outs

  That’s the end of the game.

  (with acknowledgments to the Marylebone Cricket Club)

  Hardy saw Richardson and Abel. Snow, “The Mathematician,” 67.

  practices were sacrosanct. Megahey, 27.

  “the village did much better.” Cranleigh School Magazine, October 1888, 251.

  “a thing of personal art and skill.” Neville Cardus, Play Resumed with Cardus (London Souvenir Press,
1979), 14.

  “Canvassing, Clarendon type, and professional cricket.” Records of Magpie & Stump, 966th meeting, 3 June 1910. Cambridge University.

  with walking stick and tennis ball. Woolf, Sowing, 124.

  “one long game of cricket.” Wykehamist, 20 June 1893.

  “small, taut, and wiry.” C.J. Hamson, text of a talk given in the Senior Combination Room at Trinity, 24 November 1985, and published in Trinity Review, 1986, 23.

  Accounts of Hardy as athlete. Wykehamist, December 1895.

  frustrating … a brilliant cricket career. Snow, Apology foreword, 48.

  crushed any artistic ability. Titchmarsh, 447.

  so sick he almost died. Snow, Apology foreword, 17.

  Hardy and mutton. Titchmarsh, 452. Bollobás, 120.

  never returned to visit. Wykehamist, 18 February 1948.

  Of twenty-six class hours. Bishop, 32. The figures are from 1900.

  Richardson. Sabben-Clare, 62.

  Duncan Prize. Winchester School records.

  physics on his own. The Wykehamist, 18 February 1948.

  a weakness for detective stories. Interview, Mary Cartwright. Hardy told her he had once read thirty-six of them in a week. (His sister shared the weakness: St. Catherine’s School Magazine, August 1963, 6.)

  One day when he was about fifteen. Hardy, Apology, 145.

  “Herbert was back again at Trinity.” A Fellow of Trinity, Alan St. Aubyn (London: Chatts and Windus, 1892), 261.

  “a decent enough fellow.” Hardy, Apology, 146.

  Wykehamists to Cambridge, Oxford. Wykehamist, December 1896.

  “Congratulations are due.” Wykehamist, December 1895.

  the school’s annual Speech Day. Surrey Advertiser, 1 August 1896.

  74 percent to Oxford or Cambridge. Ellis, 144.

  assigned a room in Whewell’s Court. Trinity College records.

  Tripos. See “Old Tripos Days at Cambridge,” by A. R. Forsyth, Mathematical Gazette 19 (1935): 162–179; “Old Cambridge Days,” by Leonard Roth, American Mathematical Monthly 78 (1971): 223–226 (both of these are reprinted in Campbell and Higgins, vol. 1, 81–103); Rouse Ball; Littlewood, Miscellany, and “Mathematical Life and Teaching”; Hardy, Collected Papers, 527–553.

  “the most difficult mathematical test.” Roth, in Campbell and Higgins, 97.

  in earliest form, to 1730. Rouse Ball, 11.

  “wish them Joy of their Honour.” Quoted in Oxford English Dictionary, entry for “Wrangler.”

  Wooden Spoon. Cambridge Folk Museum display.

  “All-American, a Rhodes scholar, and Bachelor of the Year.” Campbell and Higgins, vol. 1, 81.

  “You, sir.” Roth, in Campbell and Higgins, 98.

  1881 Tripos results. Littlewood, “Mathematical Life and Teaching,” 21. Typical Tripos problems. See, for example, Forsyth, in Campbell and Higgins, 86–89; Roth, in Campbell and Higgins, 97–98; Thomson, 56–60; Littlewood, Miscellany, 72–75.

  Must be a trick. The future Senior Wrangler was Littlewood. He tells the story in his Miscellany, 74.

  excellent training—for the bar. Thomson, 58.

  like a racehorse. Indeed, practically all who have written about the coaching system employ this metaphor.

  two dozen of them. Forsyth, in Campbell and Higgins, 86.

  “beyond the pale of accessible criticism.” Forsyth, in Campbell and Higgins, 84.

  handed over to R. R. Webb. Titchmarsh, 448.

  “altogether too much like a crossword puzzle.” Quoted in R. Clark, Life of Bertrand Russell, 43.

  “without serious prejudice to his career.” Hardy, Collected Papers, 537.

  “the verdict of my elders.” Hardy, Apology, 144.

  Hardy’s boyhood history of England. Titchmarsh, 447.

  Hardy’s essay impressed his examiners. Littlewood, “Reminiscences,” 12.

  Headmaster Fearon’s treatment. Titchmarsh, 448.

  Love’s suggestion. Hardy, Apology, 147.

  “at last in [the] presence of the real thing.” Hardy, Collected Papers, 722.

  into two regions. See Ibid., 723.

  “that remarkable work.” Hardy, Apology, 147.

  “even the rebel Hardy.” Littlewood, quoted in Young, 270.

  “to take so much trouble and to learn no more.” Hardy, Collected Papers, 530.

  “It is a great triumph.” Letter, G. M. Trevelyan to Hardy, 14 June 1898. Trinity College.

  “he ought to have won it.” Snow, Apology foreword, 24.

  Shakespeare Society meeting. Minutes, 23 May 1901.

  Hardy in Cranleigh. Surrey Advertiser and County Times, 7 September 1901.

  “final and irrevocable.” Trinity College, records of clubs and societies.

  The Apostles. See Deacon; Levy; Woolf, Sowing.

  “a very nice scientist.” Deacon, 33.

  Hardy inducted. Levy, 195.

  “tenacity of a bulldog.” Woolf, Sowing, 148.

  “his peculiar passion for truth.” Woolf, Beginning Again, 24.

  “Does Youth Approve of Age?” Levy, 196.

  “absolute freedom of speculation.” Quoted in Deacon, 70.

  “breathe the magic air.” Quoted in Deacon, 59.

  G. L. Dickinson. See Furbank, 59.

  who once advised Hardy. Snow, Apology foreword, 31.

  “Walt Whitmanesque feelings of comradeship.” Levy, 227.

  “The Higher Sodomy.” Deacon, 55.

  “the womanisers pretend to be sods.” Deacon, 62.

  R. K. Gaye. Woolf, Sowing, 124; Cambridge University records.

  “they were never seen apart.” Ibid., 124.

  “rumor of a young man.” Interview, Mary Cartwright.

  “just another English intellectual homosexual atheist.” Hodges, 117.

  “his beloved John Lomas.” Snow, “The Mathematician,” 72. Deacon, 73, reports that on one previous occasion Hardy tried to commit suicide, “the first time following the death of a close male friend.”

  “a non-practicing homosexual.” Interview, Béla Bollobás.

  Vote on “self-abuse.” Levy, 207.

  “schoolboy affections.” Ellis and Symonds, 39.

  “relentlessly Victorian while it could.” Hynes, 185.

  “frenetic sexual affairs.” Himmelfarb, 42.

  fathered a child. See chapter 5.

  “his knowledge of higher mathematics.” Minutes, Shakespeare Society, 16 February 1903.

  26 percent never married. Ellis, 152. Writes Ellis: “A passionate devotion to intellectual pursuits seems often to be associated with a lack of passion in the ordinary relationships of life, while excessive shyness really betrays also a feebleness of the emotional impulse.”

  Cranleigh teachers were men. Megahey, 38–39.

  Winchester was the same way. Writes Bishop, 28: “The English boarding school was not the only system in history to treat women and the family as potentially subversive elements: it has even been argued that virtually every training establishment which has exalted direct service to the community has guarded itself against the feminine threat. Like the ancient Spartans, the Turkish janissary corps and the Chinese commune, the British public school has tacitly recognized that women ‘are incapable of putting the interests of any outside body above the interests of those they love.’ ” The quote is by John Pringle, “The British Commune,” Encounter, London, February 1961.

  “society of bachelors.” Quoted in Fowler and Fowler, 233.

  “Get you to Girton.” Photo, Cambridge Folk Museum.

  “string little sentences together.” Barham, 17.

  selected for their plainness. Ibid., 1.

  “perfectly happy marriage.” Quoted in Deacon, 58.

  “the ascetic ideal is adopted.” Ellis and Symonds, 40.

  “scattered through his life.” Snow, Apology foreword, 26.

  “many forms of contact with life very painful.” Buxton and Williams, 117.

  hoping to lure Americans. Biographical Memo
irs of Fellows of the Royal Society 19 (December 1983): fn, 495.

  six hours a week of lectures. Titchmarsh, 448.

  “but very little of importance.” Hardy, Apology, 147.

  Hardy F.R.S. Royal Society records.

  The article objecting to Mendel. Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine. 1:165.

  Hardy’s reply. Hardy, Collected Papers, 477. Hardy-Weinberg Law. See entry for Hardy, by Victor Cassidy, in Thinkers of the Twentieth Century.

  a “manifesto of liberation.” Himmelfarb, 35.

  “never done anything ‘useful.’” Hardy, Apology, 150.

  “Hardyism.” Davis and Hersh, 87.

  “The ‘real’ mathematics.” Hardy, Apology, 119.

  “they do not fit the facts.” Ibid., 135.

  “a long garden party on a golden afternoon.” Hynes, 4.

  “the greatest disaster.” Campbell and Higgins, vol. 1, 96.

  “The Great Sulk.” Ibid.

  “why it should do so.” R. Clark, 43.

  “Corky.” Hardy, Collected Papers, 829. Editor’s Note.

  “instead of getting on with the real job.” Littlewood, “Mathematical Life and Teaching,” 15.

  “marooned in its limitations.” Campbell and Higgins, vol. 1, 85.

  “Oh, we never read anything.” Bell, 433.

  “with the splendour of a revelation.” E. H. Neville, obituary of Andrew Russell Forsyth. Journal of the London Mathematical Society 17 (1942), 245.

  “not very good at delta and epsilon.” Quoted in Campbell and Higgins, vol. 1, 100.

  “nothing else in the world.” Titchmarsh, 451.

  “never heard the equal.” Wiener, Ex-Prodigy, 190.

  “but you will regret it.” Barnes, 35.

  Hardy sometimes diverted to mathematics those ill-equipped for it. See, for example, Manchester Guardian, 2 December 1947.

  “the only profession.” Hardy, Apology, 150.

  “some of the most perfect English of his time.” Snow, “The Mathematician,” 68.

  Hardy’s early style “vulgar.” Bollobás, Littlewood’s Miscellany, 118.

  “light with grace, order, a sense of style.” Snow, Apology foreword, 49.

  Hardy wrote about Russell. “The New New Realism,” Cambridge Magazine, 11 and 18 May 1912.

  Hardy’s obituaries. See the Collected Papers.

  wrote up the joint paper. Cited in Bateman and Diamond, 31. But in an interview, Mary Cartwright reports that Littlewood wrote up their very last one.