Letters to a Young Mathematician Read Free Page A

years in a row killed off my mother’s interest in school; all she learned was how to goof off.
    Later she worked out what had happened, but by then it was too late. She wanted to be an English teacher, but she failed her chemistry exam. In those days, in the United Kingdom, failing just one subject, even one that was totally irrelevant to the subject you wanted to teach, meant that you could not train as a teacher.
    My mother was determined that nothing similar should happen to me. She knew I was clever; she’d taught me to read when I was three. After we had done 400 math problems and I’d gotten 396 of them right, she took the exercise book into school, showed it to the head teacher, and demanded that I be moved into the top section of the math class.
    When my collarbone healed and I went back to school, I was ten weeks ahead of the rest of the class in math. We’d overdone it a bit. Fortunately, I didn’t suffer too much while the class caught up.
    My teacher wasn’t a bad teacher. In fact, he was a very kind man. But he lacked the imagination to realize that he’d put me in the wrong section, and that his mistake was going to damage my education. I’d gotten a zero on the test because I was careless, not because I didn’t understand the material. If he’d simply told me to read the questions carefully, I’d have gotten the point.
    I was lucky then, thanks mostly to my mother’s good sense and willingness to fight for me. But I also owe a debt to my schoolmate for putting me in the hospital. He’d done it quite unintentionally—we were all shoving each other around—but it saved my mathematical bacon.
    After that I had several really brilliant math teachers. And those, let me tell you, are rare. There was one named W. E. Beck (we nicknamed him “spider”) whose Friday math test was a long-standing institution. Thosewere not easy tests. They were graded out of twenty points, and as the weeks passed, each kid’s grades were added up. The kids who were good at math were desperate to come in first for the year; the others were just desperate. I’m not sure it was acceptable educational practice—in fact I’m sure it wasn’t—but the competitive element was good for me and a few buddies.
    One of Beck’s rules was that if you missed a test, even if you were sick, you got zero. No excuses. So those of us who were in the running needed to make every point count. We knew we needed a cushion, since you weren’t safe unless you were ahead by more than twenty points. So you absolutely did not lose points by making silly mistakes. You read every question, made sure you’d done what was asked, checked everything, and then you checked it again.
    Later, when I was sixteen, I had a math teacher named Gordon Radford. Normally he was lucky to get one boy who was really talented at math, but in my class there were six of us. So he spent all of his free periods teaching us extra math, outside the syllabus. During the regular math lessons he told us to sit at the back and do our homework; not just math, any homework. And to shut up. Those lessons weren’t for us; we had to give the others a chance.
    Mr. Radford opened my eyes to what math was really like: diverse, creative, full of novelty and originality. And he did one more crucial thing for me.
    In those days, there was a public entrance exam called a State Scholarship that provided funding to go to college. You still needed to be offered a place, but a State Scholarship was a big step in the right direction. In the last year that State Scholarships were to be offered, I and two friends were a year too young to take the exam. Mr. Radford had to persuade the headmaster to put us in for the exam one year early, something the headmaster never did.
    One morning when my two friends and I arrived at school, Mr. Radford told us we would be joining the class one year ahead of us to take a “mock exam” for the State Scholarship in math. A practice run. The older kids had