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fe pi 5:41
I think that I might have made a good lawyer; but journalism is the only profession, outside academic life, in which I should have felt really confident of my chances. I write about mathematics because, like any other mathematician who has passed sixty, I have no longer the freshness of mind, the energy, or the patience to carry on effectively with my proper job. I once was compelled to go and see him in the morning, which was always his set time for mathematical work. ## 18 * * * THERE is still one point remaining over from § 11, where I started the comparison between 'real mathematics' and chess. A mathematician may still be competent enough at sixty, but it is useless to expect him to have original ideas.' When we assert that 2 + 3 = 5, we are asserting a relation between three groups of 'things'; and these 'things' are not apples or pennies, or things of any one particular sort or another, but _just_ things, 'any old things'. So much for Euclid's theorem; and, as regards Pythagoras's, it is obvious that irrationals are uninteresting to an engineer, since he is concerned only with approximations, and all approximations are rational. It makes no difference to a chess problem whether the pieces are white and black, or red and green, or whether there are physical 'pieces' at all; it is the _same_ problem which an expert carries easily in his head and which we have to reconstruct laboriously with the aid of the board. He didn't want to talk about the war. The case for my life, then, or for that of any one else who has been a mathematician in the same sense in which I have been one, is this: that I have added something to knowledge, and helped others to add more; and that these somethings have a value which differs in degree only, and not in kind, from that of the creations of the great mathematicians, or of any of the other artists, great or small, who have left some kind of memorial behind them