G. H. Hardy and probability??? (English) Zbl 1029.01016

Diaconis, Persi

Bull. Lond. Math. Soc. 34, No. 4, 385-402 (2002).

The British mathematician Godefrey Harold Hardy (1877-1947) is well known by his work in analytic number theory. His Collected Papers in 7 vols. (1966-1979) contain 350 papers to pure mathematics. Despite his antipathy to probability he contributed deeply to this topic in 3 directions: 1) Together with R. Ramanujan (1920) he contributed to probabilistic number theory, 2) His work on Tauberian theorems and divergent series has probabilistic proofs and interpretations, 3) Hardy spaces \(H^p\) are a central ingredient in stochastic calculus.
The author, who was a Hardy fellow confesses: “I do not think that I would have been able to convince Hardy to learn any probability. Rather he has convinced me to learn more of his kind of mathematics.” 90 references.

Reviewer: H.Grimm (Jena)

MSC:

01A70	Biographies, obituaries, personalia, bibliographies
01A60	History of mathematics in the 20th century
60-03	History of probability theory
11K65	Arithmetic functions in probabilistic number theory
40E05	Tauberian theorems
11-03	History of number theory