1. Next morning we visited sixty-three more Cambridge colleges and after lunch I said I was going to my room to lie down.
2. Now we come to the pons asinorum. If A is untrue, then the hook is true whatever the truth of B. The reason for this is that the hook guarantees only that A cannot be true and B false. However, this restriction removes the hook from all application to truth or reason, and reduces it to a mathematical symbol. There are no circumstances in which 'A therefore B' or 'If A then B' automatically become true statements whenever A is shown to be false. If the hook does not cover either the consequent or the conditional relationship, but one of its own invention, then its only applied function must be either as a parlour game or as a liars' charter. Formal logic, like so many things studied in the universities, must surely be a colossal waste of time.
3. Many fathers of comparably modest incomes would have looked upon a clever son as a route to riches. My son the financier, my son the barrister, my son the accountant. Tom stood quite ready and without rancour to explain the child away as my son the loopy mathematician with the scurfy hair and bottle-end spectacles.
4. Sometimes a student would present himself, and Dr P. would not recognise him; or, specifically, would not recognise his face.The moment the student spoke, he would be recognised by his voice. Such incidents multiplied, causing embarrassment, perplexity, fear -- and, sometimes, comedy. For not only did Dr P. increasingly fail to see faces, but he saw faces when there were no faces to see: genially, Magoo-like, when in the street, he might pat the heads of water-hydrants and parking-meters, taking these to be the heads of children; he would amiably address carved knobs on the furniture, and be astounded when they did not reply. At first these odd mistakes were laughed off as jokes, not least by Dr P. himself. Had he not always had a quirky sense of humour, and been given to Zen-like paradoxes and jests?
5. 'It's going to be a thirty-mile stride at a steady four and a half miles an hour, which, with half an hour for lunch, will get me back here before six. I'm going to drug my body and mind into apathy by hard exercise. Then I shall have a hot bath and a good dinner, and after that, when I'm properly fallow, I may get the revelation. The mistake I made yesterday was trying to _think_.'
It was a gleaming blustery March morning, the very weather for a walk, and I would have liked to accompany him.
6. Upon this famous Wednesday afternoon Wickets had fallen fast before the onslaught Of one who was, as Euclid might have put it, No length, or break, but only pace; and pace Had been too much for nine of them already. Then entered Tompkins the invincible, Took guard as usual, "just outside the leg," Looked around the field, and mentally decided To die - or raise his average to two.
7. Those who cannot cope with mathematics are not fully human. At best they are tolerable sub-humans who have been taught to bathe and not make messes in the house.
8. I was always very allergic to Latin when I was at Harrow. Never could see any point in it. Mensa, a table. Mensa, O table. Whoever wants to talk to a table in any language? If I'm reduced to talking to tables I'll talk to them in English. Mensa, O table! I think Latin is a wooden-headed language.
9. Religion makes beauty enchanting; And even where beauty is wanting, The temper and mind, Religion-refined, Will shine through the veil with sweet lustre.
10. -- and it was handsome to see him chalk off mathematical nightmares on the blackboard that would stump the angels themselves, and do it like nothing, too -- all about eclipses, and comets, and solstices, and constellations, and mean time, and sidereal time, and dinner time, and bedtime, and every other imaginable thing above the clouds or under them that you could harry or bullyrag an enemy with and make him wish he hadn't come --