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Summary

I WILL end with a summary of my conclusions, but putting them in a more personal way. I said at the beginning that anyone who defends his subject will find that he is defending himself; and my justification of the life of a professional mathematician is bound to be, at bottom, a justification of my own. Thus this concluding section will be in its substance a fragment of autobiography.

I cannot remember ever having wanted to be anything but a mathematician. I suppose that it was always clear that my specific abilities lay that way, and it never occurred to me to question the verdict of my elders. I do not remember having felt, as a boy, any passion for mathematics, and such notions as I may have had of the career of a mathematician were far from noble. I thought of mathematics in terms of examinations and scholarships: I wanted to beat other boys, and this seemed to be the way in which I could do so most decisively.

I was about fifteen when (in a rather odd way) my ambitions took a sharper turn. There is a book by ‘Alan St Aubyn’ called A Fellow of Trinity, one of a series dealing with what is supposed to be Cambridge college life. I suppose that it is a worse book than most of Marie Corelli's; but a book can hardly be entirely bad if it fires a clever boy's imagination. There are two heroes, a primary hero called Flowers, who is almost wholly good, and a secondary hero, a much weaker vessel, called Brown.