“One day at Fenner's (the university cricket ground at Cambridge), just before the last war, G. H. Hardy and I were talking about Einstein. Hardy had met him several times, and I had recently returned from visiting him. Hardy was saying that in his lifetime there had only been two men in the world, in all the fields of human achievement, science, literature, politics, anything you like, who qualified for the Bradman class. For those not familiar with cricket, or with Hardy's personal idiom, I ought to mention that “the Bradman class” denoted the highest kind of excellence: it would include Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Newton, Archimedes, and maybe a dozen others. Well, said Hardy, there had only been two additions in his lifetime. One was Lenin and the other Einstein.” ScienceLiteraturePoliticsNewtonShakespeareCambridgeWilliam ShakespeareEinsteinTolstoyLeninAlbert EinsteinIsaac NewtonLeo TolstoyArchimedesVladimir LeninG H HardyBradman ClassCount Lev Nikolayevich TolstoyGodfrey HardyGodfrey Harold HardyLev Nikolayevich TolstoyVladimir Ilyich Lenin Book:Variety of Men Source: Variety of Men
“{Replying to G. H. Hardy's suggestion that the number of a taxi (1729) was 'dull', showing off his spontaneous mathematical genius} No, it is a very interesting number; it is the smallest number expressible as a sum of two cubes in two different ways, the two ways being 13 + 123 and 93 + 103.” HumorScienceInterestingGeniusMathematicsMathSpontaneousHardyNumberG H Hardy Author:Srinivasa Ramanujan Aiyangar