Godfrey Harold Hardy (1877-1947)

Hardy, professor of mathematics first at Oxford and then at Cambridge, has been called the greatest English Mathematician of the twentieth century. His mathematical contributions spanned many areas of pure mathematics, including Diophantine analysis, Fourier analysis and the Riemann zeta function. His paper in 1908 describing what we know now as the Hardy-Weinberg principle or law, opens in a self-deprecatory fashion characteristic of the British:- "I am reluctant to intrude in a discussion concerning matters of which I have no expert knowledge… However, [my point] may still be worth making". Hardy never met Weinberg and had no knowledge of Weinberg's work when he wrote his paper, which was published in the same year. Ironically, Hardy had a great admiration for Germany and was quite unhappy that the British declared war against that nation twice in his lifetime. In the best tradition of English academics, Hardy had many eccentricities. He never married, and throughout the entire time he was at Cambridge he lived in rooms in his college. He abhorred mirrors, and would invariably cover any such furnishings when first entering a hotel room. Once, while in a visit to Demark, he wrote a postcard back to England claiming that he had proved the Riemann hypothesis--together with Fermat's last theorem one of the two most famous unsolved problems in mathematics. He considered this to be a form of insurance--that God (in whom he professed not to believe) would not let him drown on the return journey with such fame.

Wilhelm Weinberg (1862-1937)

The details of Wilhelm Weinberg's life could not have been more different from those of Hardy. Weinberg was not an academic, but a general practitioner and an obstetrician with a large practice in the southern German city of Stuttgart. He was by all accounts happily married with five children. While Hardy could be described as retiring and diffident, Weinberg had a reputation for aggressiveness. In contrast to Hardy, who enjoyed productive collaborations with some of the greatest Mathematicians of the early part of the 20th century, Weinberg worked quite alone; he had no students or collaborators. Lastly but certainly not least, Hardy made only one contribution in genetics, while Weinberg worked in genetics all his life. In spite of the demands of a large medical practice, Weinberg published a number of fundamental papers on a wide range of topics in genetics. His contributions spanned four areas; twin studies, human mutation, medical statistics, and application of the laws of inheritance to populations. His principal work in this latter area described what is now known as the Hardy-Weinberg law, and was published in 1908 a couple of months before Hardy's paper. Weinberg knew nothing of Hardy's work on this topic.