It was not just mathematics in which Hardy was gifted, but all to which he took his hand. Yet a fragility, a diffidence, sometimes undermined it. He was painfully shy and self-conscious and could scarcely bear going up before the whole school to accept a prize. Sometimes he’d give wrong answers to ensure he wouldn’t have to do so. “Over-delicate,” his friend Snow described him later. “He seems to have been born with three skins too few.”
