The Prehistory of the Hardy Inequality

1. INTRODUCTION. The development of the famous Hardy inequality (in both its discrete and continuous forms) during the period 1906–1928 has its own history or, as we have called it, prehistory. Contributions of mathematicians other than G. are important here. In this article we describe some of those contributions. We also include and comment upon several facts and early proofs that are not available in many references on this subject. We consider the following statement of the Hardy inequality: the discrete inequality asserts that if p > 1 and {a k }