A Mathematician's Apology.

Cambridge: At the University Press,, 1940. Hardy the mentor First edition, first impression, of the author's famous defence of mathematics; the Cambridge mathematician Dr L. S. Goddard's copy, accompanied by an unpublished autograph letter signed from Hardy to Goddard, in which he gives sage advice on both publishing practices and formula construction. Hardy wrote A Mathematician's Apology, "the most poetic writing about being a mathematician" (ODNB), at the outbreak of the Second World War. A committed pacifist, he argued that mathematics should be pursued for its own sake rather than for its application to military advances. His friend and pupil C. P. Snow, who contributed the foreword to the 1967 edition, believed that it was, "if read with the textual attention it deserves, a book of haunting sadness. Yes, it is witty and sharp with intellectual high spirits: yes, the crystalline clarity and candour are still there: yes, it is the testament of a creative artist. But it is also, in an understated stoical fashion, a passionate lament for creative powers that used to be and that will never come again. I know nothing like it in the language" (pp. 50-1). The dust jacket is illustrated with an extract from Hardy and Srinivasa Ramanujan's consequential 1918 paper "Asymptotic formulae in combinatory analysis". Laurence Stanley Goddard's ink ownership inscription on the front free endpaper is dated 7 December 1940, when he was a student at St John's College, Cambridge. Prior to earning his PhD in 1947, he published several academic papers, including "A problem in the summation of series", which Hardy communicated on his behalf to the Cambridge Philosophical Society in 1943. In 1979, while a professor in the mathematics department at Salford University, Goddard wrote an article on Hardy for the Australian Mathematical Society Gazette to mark the 100th anniversary of Hardy's birth. Goddard bequeathed £80,000 to his alma mater to support graduate studies in pure mathematics. In the lengthy autograph letter, written four years after the publication of A Mathematician's Apology, Hardy assumes a mentor role. "I have sent on your MS to Wilson: I have no further criticism, except that your figures for the contours seem hardly necessary (you can describe them in a few words; they are the 'obvious' ones; and space is precious nowadays)". He proceeds to write about the Cauchy-Hadamard theorem and its relevance to Goddard's work, patiently walking the then-student through a series of equations. Octavo. Original pink cloth, printed paper spine label. With dust jacket. Autograph letter signed: single sheet of plain paper, handwritten in black ink across both sides, dated 27 December 1944 from Trinity College, Cambridge, with original envelope addressed to L. S. Goddard of Hillingdon, Middlesex, post marked 28 December 1944. Additional spine label tipped onto rear pastedown as issued. Binding bright and unmarked, contents clean bar a handful of pencil marks; unclipped jacket lightly spotted and soiled in places, neatly repaired along spine joints and front flap fold, earlier tape repair on verso: a fine copy in good only jacket. Autograph letter creased from folding, envelope browned: both in very good condition. L. S. Goddard, "A problem in the summation of series", Mathematical Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, vol. 39, no. 3, Oct. 1943; idem., "Godfrey Harold Hardy", Australian Mathematical Society Gazette, vol. 6, no. 2, 1979.