Maker of Patterns

by Freeman Dyson

  I have joined the Cambridge University Mountaineering Club which may prove a fateful decision, as it has meets in every vacation lasting a week, and I shall go to most of them. It has lectures by Great Men periodically; the first is tomorrow. At the meets there is a large hut where the people sleep; and parties of various degrees of competence go out every day to do their worst. It is, they say, the leading climbing club in the country as far as really difficult climbing is concerned; but they assure me it caters for novices in large numbers. I shall have to get boots, ropes, and all the other lethal weapons. The Christmas meet is in North Wales every year. In peacetime they went abroad to Alps and Pyrenees. I have not yet succeeded in making any new friends. If ever I do need friends, I have no doubt I shall find some on the precipices of Snowdon.

  I have fixed up all my lectures now, they are: Hardy on Fourier series, Besicovitch on integration, Dirac on quantum mechanics, Pars on dynamics. The lectures are very select; Hardy has an audience of four, Besicovitch three, Pars four, and Dirac about twenty. All these lectures are, at any rate in parts, new to me; and all the lecturers know how to lecture; so I enjoy them very much. Dirac is very slow and easy to follow; Pars and Besicovitch a bit quicker, but still comfortable; Hardy goes like an avalanche and it is all I can do to keep up with him. One learns about three times as much from Hardy in an hour as from anyone else; it is a testing business keeping the thread of his arguments. If one can do it, one can do almost anything in analysis. Fortunately, though I have not had much practice, I know the tricks of the trade and am seldom entirely fogged.

  I went to the university library on Monday. It is a vast place, with every book ever printed in it somewhere (with no doubt a few exceptions). I browsed in its labyrinths for a few hours and found a lot of interesting stuff. The best part of it, however, was the tea room which gives the best value for money I have seen for a long time. On the whole I shall not go there much except to have tea, for all the books one could ever read are in the Trinity Library. This is a very comfortable place, with any amount of journals in many languages. If ever I start investigating some particular subject, I shall find all I want there.

  I find there is no compulsion, or even suggestion, for me to do anything in the way of duty, military or civil, until I have to register (sometime next year). In any case the air squadron would not take me till my last year. There do not seem to be any intellectual societies like the Winchester ones which were so ubiquitous. All the societies are either purely political or purely technical; general education seems to be entirely neglected. However, I have had enough to last me a bit.

  Winchester College was the high school that I attended for five years before going to Cambridge. It was an ancient school, founded in 1382 to educate the young Catholic priests who became the permanent bureaucracy running England while the kings were away fighting in France. The school survived the Protestant Reformation and maintained high intellectual standards. The boys enjoyed great freedom, with plenty of time outside the classroom to pursue their own interests. Informal clubs proliferated. I belonged to the Obscure Languages Club, whose main purpose was to speak obscenities in as many languages as possible. My father had been a teacher at the same school, running the music department, playing the organ in chapel services, and conducting choirs and orchestras. He became well known as a composer and broadcaster. He left the school in 1938 to become director of the Royal College of Music.

  Both at Winchester College and at the Royal College, the war that began for England in 1939 hit us hard. We knew that we were in it for the long haul, with no end in sight, with a high probability that little that we valued would survive. And yet in a paradoxical way, our response to the war in both places was to ignore it as far as possible. My father in London, and our teachers at Winchester, understood that the best way to show our contempt for Hitler was to continue making music and to continue studying Latin and Greek, as if Hitler did not exist. My father said to the students in London in 1940, “All we have to do is to behave halfway decently, and the whole world will come to our side.” That was his way of fighting Hitler. The paradoxical result is that in these letters written during the darkest years of the war, the war is hardly mentioned. In Cambridge, just as in London and in Winchester, the way to defend England was to make sure that there would be something in England worth defending.

  OCTOBER 25, 1941

  On Monday I went to the mountaineering club. Dr. Jacub Bahar on “The Tatra and the Himalaya” with slides. He is a Pole who climbed Nanda Devi East Peak in 1939. Of a party of four, the leader and another were killed on another mountain afterwards. This man told the story beautifully, and the slides were magnificent. The Tatra are on the Polish-Slovakian frontier and are, apparently, very climbable. They are the chief mountaineering resort of Eastern Europe. My lectures are all proceeding according to plan. I have discovered more about analysis in eight hours of Hardy’s “Fourier series” than could be derived from many volumes. And even old Besicovitch hits the nail on the head occasionally. Pars is making dynamics a great deal less repellent; in fact it is worth doing if you do it like him. Dirac is the only lecturer who does not break new ground as far as I am concerned, but he suffers from an audience of twenty. Later on when he stops dealing with the fundamentals, which are mathematical, which I know and they don’t, he will go on to physics, which I don’t know and they do.

  I was unexpectedly one morning appointed “stair-case marshal” which means that I have to look after my staircase, put out bombs and carry out corpses, if a bomb happens to burst within twenty yards of us. All my duties have amounted to so far is trying to get a stirrup-pump mended by plumbers who know nothing about it.

  The stirrup-pump was standard equipment during the war for putting out firebombs. It stood in a bucket filled with water and pumped the water into a hose that was directed at the fire. It was hand-operated and needed no electricity. I never had a chance to use it.

  NOVEMBER 2, 1941

  I have started on some work of my own. On Thursday Besicovitch gave me a medium-size book entitled L’Hypothèse du Continu by Waclaw Sierpinski, the great Polish mathematician, and told me to come back when I had mastered chapters 1 and 2. I having read them (seventy-five pages merely) with understanding except for fairly unimportant technical terms, I went to see him on Saturday; and after elucidating certain points he propounded a problem for me to work on. He gave me several papers to read, by himself and Sierpinski chiefly; one of them is a very elegant proof of an allied problem found by Besicovitch in the last two months. All the papers refer to Besicovitch as quite a great man; they talk about “Besicovitch measure,” “Besicovitch dimension,” and so on. I have not yet got to grips with my problem; I must read the papers before I know what it means. I shall have an interesting time whether it proves amenable or not. Besicovitch says it will be very good if I solve it in a few months.

  SUNDAY, BETTWS-Y-COED HELYG FARM

  I am safely installed here after a very exhausting journey. The farm consists of two rooms, one for sleeping and drying the clothes and the other for everything else. The table seats ten at a pinch; it will be even more intimate when we are twenty. It is a great triumph having got here. These Welsh are very suspicious. For the first time in my life I was asked for my identity card, by a body of miscellaneous women, and then again later by a policeman. At six-thirty a.m. in Bangor I met an unfortunate trombone player who was trying to find the BBC but did not know where he was or where they were. I hope he is not still roaming the streets with his trombone. I was more fortunate. It took six hours to cover the twelve miles from Bangor to here. Never again will I take a suitcase on foot for long distances, though actually I got lifts for about half the distance.

  The trombonist was probably looking for the BBC studio where the Welsh National Radio programs were broadcast.

  FRIDAY, HELYG

  My career has suffered a temporary eclipse after a most promising start; yesterday I went out with two gallant gentlemen to climb
a cliff known as something Ddu, which proved rather difficult as it was encased in about six inches of moss. The first gallant, by name Bumpstead, who is an old stager, led; and progressed upwards with immense deliberation, stopping now and then to restore the circulation to his fingers. He complained that a river was flowing down his sleeves and out at his boots. We two sat in the rain at the bottom for about an hour, after which the second man started. I sat disconsolately underneath paying out the rope inch by inch. At last when there were only about five feet of rope left there was a vague shout from above. A little later I felt a sharp blow on the side of the head. Feeling very cold and tired, I retired to a secluded corner and wept silently; then all of a sudden I seemed to be soused in blood from head to foot, and I must confess ignoble joy filled my breast with the thought of an early return to the warmth of Helyg. I shouted to Bumpstead to come to my assistance. Fortunately he was able to come to the bottom quickly, after the second man had scrambled to the top. It was his first careless rapture on reaching the top that caused the stone to fall.

  Bumpstead efficiently bound me up with my two handkerchiefs, which stopped the bleeding; and we set off leisurely downhill to Helyg, where I was given a pint of tea and felt very happy. Finally a doctor arrived and spent a half-hour poking about with razors, probes, and needles, which was about as bad as an average session with a ruthless dentist. He finished by sewing it up with silk. He said that it was a small cut but happened to have punctured an artery and that nothing effective could be done without opening up the skin and finding the artery. Accordingly I proceeded by ambulance to Llandudno hospital. Here I spent the night quite comfortably except for my rapidly increasing hunger. It is apparently not done to give patients anything to eat after nine o’clock. At four a.m. the night nurse was finally constrained upon to provide some bread and butter. I have since then been very well treated. I have here no money, no spectacles, and a most peculiar outfit of clothes, but I shall get to Helyg and collect my belongings in any case. This hospital is a marvellous modern place, reminiscent of Aldous Huxley’s “Park Lane Hospital for the Dying” in Brave New World [1932]. Wireless laid on for every bed. Do not worry about me, I shall be out and about by the time you can communicate with me.

  In Huxley’s vision of the future, the fear of dying has been abolished by universal use of euphoric drugs, and boredom has been abolished by ubiquitous television.

  During the time that I spent at the climbing hut in Wales, a week at the beginning of December 1941, the big world changed. Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and declared war on the United States and Britain. Hitler declared war on the United States. Suddenly we had the Americans as allies. The victorious end of the war changed from a distant hope to a certainty. We heard nothing of these events at Helyg. I learned that the world had changed only after I was back with my family. There is not a word in the letters about the changes. Life at Cambridge continued as before.

  JANUARY 24, 1942

  I went along to Besicovitch to see him and found him at the billiard table and very friendly. Having found when the lectures were, I made so bold as to ask him about Russian teaching, and he appeared to be very interested and began talking volubly in Russian. Remarking desperately “medlenno, pozhaluista,” I stemmed the flow and managed to collect my wits sufficiently to conduct a conversation of sorts for a few minutes, in which it was decided that I should go to Prince Obolensky who is a Russian research student in Trinity, and he would introduce me to Miss Hill the boss, who only comes down from London twice a week. He then offered to write out a line of introduction for Prince Obolensky and produced a page of illegible writing for me to present to him. As the Prince is not yet in residence, but is returning over the weekend, that is as far as the matter has yet progressed. On Wednesday I went to Littlewood for the first time and liked him very much. He is talking about the modern view of functions of a complex variable, and though I know most of it vaguely, he makes it far more concrete than the books do. It is very pleasant to find such a lot of people who are glad to see me. Even Hardy asked me whether it was a bomb or a motor accident, and Besicovitch told me a grim story about how when he was young in Russia a friend in jest plunged a three-bladed knife into his back, after which he lingered on death’s door for a fortnight.

  WEDNESDAY

  The noble Prince Obolensky continues to inhabit the Absolute Elsewhere, and so I have not made contact with him yet, but I have had an even greater honour, for Besicovitch invited me in on Monday night to have my accent superintended, and he started off by making me repeat after him line by line a little poem of eight lines until I knew it by heart, and explained where the mistakes were. I continued this for about forty minutes, and I have no doubt I have benefited. He says that the general effect is not bad, probably owing to the Linguaphone records at Winchester. The difficulty is always in pronouncing the consonants gently enough, for to a Russian an English v is very nearly an f and a g nearly a k and a th nearly a t. And one thing which I was very nearly beaten by was the difference between hard sh and soft sh. However it was very amusing, and it is a lovely little poem. After that was over we conversed a little in Russian, and finally he found it easier to talk in English and talked very interestingly about various things until I departed. He confessed that he was finding it difficult to keep to his new year resolution of only six hours billiards a week, and that the other day Hardy made a break of eighty-two; but of course I was most interested in his dealings with the Bolsheviks. He said that after the revolution he organized a high school at Perm and for three years successfully resisted the Bolshevist doctrines of education by telling the teachers to teach exactly in the way they thought best. The official doctrine of education is that everything must be taught in relation to labour, and that it is the job of the teacher to discover how this is to be done; so if it can’t be done, the teacher has to pretend it can. However he said the Communists in practice usually had a great respect for academic learning, and they came to his school and worked hard.

  After that he went with four professorships at a total stipend of 150 pounds a year to Leningrad and taught for two or three years. The Communists there being more regimented, they quarrelled with him and ousted him one by one from three of his four positions. He said that as a mathematician he could always have got support from the Moscow government, but at this point he left Russia. The Communists have since then gradually come round to sensible methods of teaching. He said that Bolshevism alone has saved Russia now and has been the effective cure for the country’s diseases. But I imagine that he left because he put mathematics first, both ideally and from personal preference. I did not press him to ask whether the story of his escape by swimming the Volga was true.

  Besicovitch was lucky to leave Russia before the great purges of the 1930s, when a large fraction of educated people were executed or sent to concentration camps. Many of those who survived the camps were released when Russia was invaded in 1941. His view of Russia left out most of the worst horrors.

  THURSDAY

  Prince Obolensky, I discovered last Sunday, after standing about for an hour or more in bitter snow and wind, is working in London and only comes to Cambridge on Sundays once a fortnight. Then he takes his meals with friends and comes to his rooms just to pick up his belongings. So that was why I had to stand about; I finally extracted that much information from his bedmaker, but it all seems pretty useless. The famous footballer Prince Obolensky who died recently was the cousin of this one, but as they derive their title in the direct line from Rurik the first Lord of Russia around 900 A.D. before tsars were invented, it is not surprising that there should be more than one.

  FEBRUARY 10, 1942

  I received a cake from Aunt Margaret last week. I managed to invite a man to eat it with me on Sunday, and I chose a refugee by the name of Chrysel [Correctly spelled, his name was Georg Kreisel. He played a dramatic role in my story fifteen years later.] who has come up this term and is a pursuer of “higher thought” in matters mathematical. Th
e tea party was not entirely a failure, and the guest was very appreciative. He talked incessantly about the nature of knowledge. He goes to some classes held by Professor Wittgenstein of which I was entirely uninformed, but which sound most amusing, though Chrysel like a good German is incapable of taking anything except with deadly earnest. How these Germans take things seriously. Chrysel remarked casually that he had read fifteen philosophical books by Bertrand Russell alone since he came to England two and a half years ago, and of course he has read one at least of Kant and Hegel, Descartes and Leibnitz in the originals, three or four of Whitehead, three of Moore, and any number of others. He was at Dulwich School and apparently picked up his philosophical bent there from his housemaster. He is taking mathematics as his main subject and knows a good deal about that too. He lived in Vienna, but I do not know what else he has done. He is a logical positivist. He makes his creed “Everybody else is wrong” rather than “I am right,” like Socrates, and is equally annoying if you are not in a good temper, as Socrates’s victims usually were not. Fortunately I was in a good temper on Sunday and enjoyed it very much. I shall go to tea with him one of these days.

  The other thing I have achieved since last week is to make my first contact with Elizabeth Hill. It is amazing that it has taken a month’s effort to do it, and I am not through until next Tuesday. First I tried Obolensky, and it took two weeks’ search to discover what had happened to him; then I asked Besicovitch how to find Miss Hill, and he said, “See her at her lecture room in Mill Lane.” On Monday I was going down to Mill Lane in a vague hope that I might discover where her rooms were, and I happened to go into a bookshop on the way, and what should I hear but a young lady ordering some Russian books, and she said, “But why haven’t you got the things that Miss Hill ordered three weeks ago?” So I took the heaven-sent opportunity and said, “Can you tell me Miss Hill’s name and number?” and she told me her address, which wasn’t in Mill Lane at all. It is marvellous how inaccessible people manage to be.