John Edensor Littlewood

Quotes

• “It was Mr. Littlewood (I believe) who remarked that "every positive integer was one of his personal friends."”
• “The Greeks first spoke a language which modern mathematicians can understand; as Littlewood said to me once, they are not clever schoolboys or "scholarship candidates", but "Fellows of another college".”
• “A good mathematical joke is better, and better mathematics, than a dozen mediocre papers.”
• “'The surprising thing about this paper is that a man who could write it--would.'”
• “Landau kept a printed form for dealing with proofs of Fermat's last theorem. 'On page blank, lines blank to blank, you will find there is a mistake.'”
• “I read in the proof-sheets of Hardy on Ramanujan: 'As someone said, each of the positive integers was one of his personal friends.' My reaction was, 'I wonder who said that; I wish I had.' In the next proof-sheets I read (what now stands): 'It was Littlewood who said...' (What had happened was that Hardy had received the remark in silence and with a poker face, and I wrote it off as a dud....)”

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Key dates

Born

9 June 1885

Died

6 September 1977

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Wikidata facts

Instance of

human

Given name

John

Gender

male

Citizenship

United Kingdom

Place of birth

Rochester

Place of death

Cambridge

Occupation

university teacher

Educated at

University of Cambridge

Employer

University of Cambridge

Languages spoken

English language

Religion

Anglicanism

Award

Smith's Prize

Notable work

Littlewood's law

Doctoral advisor

Ernest Barnes

Student of

Francis Sowerby Macaulay

Field of work

calculus

Image

John Edensor Littlewood.jpg

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