A Mathematician's Apology

Godfrey H. Hardy, one of the 20th century’s most prominent mathematicians, worked within a set of distinct social and political beliefs that influenced his choice of specialties, his behavior in his work life, and his social world. A strong supporter of public reforms, Hardy tried to tilt the English study of math away from destructive ends and toward more artful uses.

Although brought up in a life of privilege and trained to a rigorous logical standard, Hardy objected to the elitism that he found in English higher education. A friendly conversationalist, he nonetheless felt that the culture at Cambridge was self-congratulatory, and he avoided much of the university’s organized socializing. Additionally, he was an atheist and refused to attend the religious services required of university members.

During World War I, Hardy supported the efforts of mathematician-philosopher Bertrand Russell and others who argued for Britain’s withdrawal from the battlefield. Russell served a stint in prison for his beliefs; Hardy wrote a broadside that clarified those events to the outside world, and his famously rigorous regard for the truth helped clear up some of the biased beliefs about the period. Frustrated by the university faculty’s enthusiastic support of the war effort, he left Cambridge for a time and instead taught at Oxford.

An elite cadre of scientists and philosophers, the Cambridge Apostles, inducted Hardy. This group was the scientific counterpart to the “Bloomsbury group” of literary and artistic Cambridge graduates who met regularly in London to promote the arts and advocate for social reform. Hardy sympathized with the Bloomsbury group and had regular contact with them. Briefly during the 1920s, Hardy also was president of a scientist trade union.

Hardy may have been gay; his colleague John Littlewood claimed that Hardy was a “non-practicing homosexual” (Russell: The Journal of the Bertrand Russell Archives. McMaster University Library Press, 2007). Although this is irrelevant to his mathematical achievements, it may have contributed to Hardy’s sense of being a social outsider during a time when society prohibited alternative sexual orientations.

War again intruded in Europe in 1939, and Hardy once again chafed at the carnage and waste. His beliefs about society and his support for reforms never wavered during his long career. His vision for peaceful uses of mathematics, a product of his sociopolitical beliefs, remain to this day ideals still unachieved.