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Comment by OldGuyInTheClub | Hacker News Reader

From the title page. No Ph.D. necessary to be a legend in them days. ;-)

  G. H. HARDY, M.A., F.R.S.
  FELLOW OF NEW COLLEGE
  SAVILIAN PROFESSOR OF GEOMETRY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
  LATE FELLOW OF TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE

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M.A. was the highest degree available in the UK at the time [1]. The closest equivalent to a PhD program might be the Prize Fellowship that Hardy had from 1900 to 1906, though it's certainly not one to one. Don't get the impression that Hardy was done with his education when he got his masters degree.

[1] https://www.economics.soton.ac.uk/staff/aldrich/Doc1.htm

[2] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsbm.1949.000...

Interesting. The Wikipedia page for his contemporary Littlewood lists a Doctoral Advisor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Edensor_Littlewood

Edit: The Mathematics Genealogy Project lists Littlewood as an M.A. as well.

https://www.mathgenealogy.org/id.php?id=10463

Simon Peyton Jones is a relatively recent example of someone who went from BSc in Cambridge, to a lectureship and eventually a professorship, without a PhD:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Peyton_Jones#Education

That can still happen today.

One of my Cambridge professors was Mr. Phil Woodland, an international authority on automatic speech recognition. When I asked him why he had no Ph.D., he shrugged and said he was too busy with his research work, so he "never found the time". Meanwhile, he got promoted to Professor [1].

Another noteworthy fact about Oxford and Cambridge that people from elsewhere may not realize is that they award an M.A. "for free" to Bachelor students after 5 years have passed, so you effectively get two degrees for the price of one.

[1] https://www.eng.cam.ac.uk/profiles/pw117

You don't now either.... I'm an academic scientist and more than a few times I have looked up the CVs of well respected researchers whose work I really admired, and was shocked to discover they had no PhD, yet were still in a permanent PI position leading a well funded research effort of some type.

There are a small number of people in academia that are so good that they are effectively exempted from the requirement for traditional credentials- because everyone in the field knows who they are and will make a custom position for them anywhere that bypasses traditional requirements and recruitment.

Freeman Dyson famously never got a PhD either, he just made seminal contributions to quantum field theory instead

Yeah... he hated the Ph.D. system, called it evil. He also said a great advantage of the Institute for Advanced Study was that he could work with postdocs - recent products of that same evil system.

Source: Why I don't like the PhD system (95/157)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzC1IRYN_Ps

PhD, and especially its near ubiquity in academic circles, is a relatively new phenomena.

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