As my wise old mum used to say: ‘The square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides’. But she was a mathematician and you had to think yourself lucky that she didn’t recite the formula for solving quadratic equations at moments of crisis, especially as she always had trouble remembering it all and often had to work it out from first principles, which often necessitated carrying a blackboard and chalk on family outings.
Still, it was a happy childhood, even though we had to display our working far more than other children of our age. I still have the book of four-figure log tables she gave me for my fourth birthday, even though the picture of Bambi on the cover does make it seem less than grown-up these days. I can still remember the bedtime stories she’d read to use from Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem and the necessity of repeating al our times tables before sitting down to the evening meal together as we checked to see which one of us she’d favoured with a prime number of vegetables.
Still, all good things come to an end, except those that are infinite, of course, and she seemed so disappointed in me when I said I was off to university to study Golf Course Management, instead of the Pure Maths she’d always hoped I’d choose. But I had to go my own way, even though she regarded my interest in the trigonometry of golf courses as trivial, at best.
Anyway, at night now, I’ve found myself reading some of the great mathematical theorems to my own children at bedtime and every now and then, my wife and I do a few equations together in the moonlight.
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