When Jordan died almost three decades later, it would be Hardy who wrote his obituary in Proceedings of the Royal Society and took the opportunity to comment on the book that changed his life: “To have read it and mastered it is a mathematical education in itself,” Hardy wrote, “and it is hardly possible to overstate the influence which it has had on those who, coming to it as I did from the elaborate futilities of ‘Tripos’ mathematics, have found themselves at last in [the] presence of the real thing.”
