ABSTRACT
John Edensor Littlewood was born at Rochester on 9 June, 1885, the eldest son of Edward Thornton Littlewood and Sylvia Maud, daughter of Dr. William Henry and Sophia Ackland. In the nineteenth century this attitude had been confirmed by the prestige of Stokes, Clerk Maxwell, Kelvin and others. On the continent of Europe the nineteenth century was as fruitful in pure mathematics as England was barren. In 1911, Hardy and Littlewood had a number of common interests which each of them would be impelled to pursue. To name three, there were summability, Abelian and Tauberian theorems, Diophantine approximation with its applications to function-theory, the theory of numbers—the challenges to analysts underlined by Landau’s inimitable Primzahlen. The mathematical problems of gunnery were neither formidable nor aesthetic, and they would have repelled Hardy, but Littlewood tackled them cheerfully and was able to reduce the man-hours of calculations needed in the pre-electronic age.
