G. H. Hardy

Godfrey Harold Hardy (1877 to 1947) was an English mathematician known for his work in number theory and for his collaboration with the Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan. In biology his name is attached to the Hardy-Weinberg principle, which he published in 1908.

At a lunch at Cambridge, the geneticist Reginald Punnett mentioned an objection to Mendel's theory: that a dominant trait ought to become more and more common. Hardy, who knew little about biology, thought the answer was obvious, and wrote a short letter to the journal Science in 1908 showing that with random mating the proportions of alleles stay constant. He remarked that it was something that "should have been familiar to biologists." The German physician Wilhelm Weinberg had published the same result independently the same year.

Hardy spent most of his career at Trinity College, Cambridge, and at Oxford. With John Littlewood he wrote a long series of papers on analysis and number theory. In 1913 he recognized the genius of Ramanujan from a letter and brought him to Cambridge, which Hardy later called the one romantic incident of his life. His book A Mathematician's Apology (1940) is a classic reflection on the nature of mathematical beauty.

Despite his view that applied mathematics was trivial, the principle gives the null model of population genetics, used to detect departures caused by selection or drift and to calculate carrier rates for diseases such as cystic fibrosis. It laid the ground for the work of Ronald Fisher and others on evolution and uses probability ideas like the binomial distribution.

• Hardy-Weinberg Principle — his contribution to genetics
• Population Genetics — the field it launched
• Gregor Mendel — the founder of the genetics he applied