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J E Littlewood is best known for his collaboration with G H Hardy on summability, function theory and number theory.
Littlewood studied at Trinity College Cambridge. From 1907 to 1910 he lectured at the University of Manchester. He became a fellow of the Trinity College (1908) returning there in 1910. He was to become Rouse Ball professor of mathematics there in 1928. In World War I Littlewood served in the Royal Garrison Artillery.
For 35 years he collaborated with G H Hardy working on the theory of series, the Riemann zeta function, inequalities and the theory of functions. The collaboration led to a series of papers Partito numerorum using the Hardy-Littlewood-Ramanujan analytical method.
Hardy wrote of Littlewood that he knew of
no one else who could command such a combination of insight, technique and power .
Littlewood was seldom seen outside Cambridge, in fact there were jokes around that he was the invention of Hardy.
In the late 1930's the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research tried to interest pure mathematicians in nonlinear differential equations which were important for radio engineers and scientists because they described the behaviour of electric circuits. The impending war motivated the interest. Littlewood, working jointly with Mary Cartwright, spent 20 years working on equations of this type such as van der Pol's equation.
Littlewood was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1915. He received the Royal Medal of the Society in 1929, the Sylvester Medal of the Society in 1943 and the Copley Medal of the Society in 1958.
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