When Cocks did eventually realize what he had done, it struck him that his discovery might have disappointed G.H. Hardy, one of the great English mathematicians of the early part of the century. In his The Mathematician’s Apology, written in 1940, Hardy had proudly stated: “Real mathematics has no effects on war. No one has yet discovered any warlike purpose to be served by the theory of numbers.” Real mathematics means pure mathematics, such as the number theory that was at the heart of Cocks’s work. Cocks proved that Hardy was wrong.
