Many of you have appreciated in my last Web my remembrances of a good friend and a great person as Dr P. C. Vaidya was, and I’m thankful for that. But some have felt alarmed at my sentence, ‘I do not accept one occupation to be higher than the other’, referring to my own occupation as a mathematics teacher and as a priest. Is not being a priest ‘better’ that being a mathematics teacher? Is not saying Mass something ‘higher’ that teaching Pythagoras? Is not priesthood a vocation while being a teacher is only a profession?

As for myself, one occupation is as sacred as the other. Teaching is also a vocation. The same God who called me to the priesthood, called me to mathematics. Or is it that God singled me out personally for the priesthood whereas he had nothing to do with my mathematics? I took both tasks with full enthusiasm and total commitment. I precisely quoted the English mathematician G. H. Hardy, the ‘apostle’ of rigour in mathematical demonstrations in last century who said of himself he taught mathematics ‘with the zeal of a missionary teaching the Bible to cannibals.’ I love that quotation. I got as much pleasure out of his classical work ‘Pure Mathematics’ as out of the study of St Paul which has been my permanent hobby through life. Just now a de luxe ‘centenary edition’ of that work of Hardy’s has been published to mark hundred years since its publication. Few mathematics books have received such honours after Euclid’s ‘Elements’. Its results are dated, of course, but its spirit lives through its pages. He loved the expression ‘pure mathematics’ which referred to mathematics in themselves, not to any of its applications, which are many but which he rather despised. He prided himself on the fact that none of his mathematical discoveries had any practical use whatsoever, and he was disappointed when a mathematical physicist once did find a practical application for one of his theorems. He felt the purity of his research had been stained.

There is a charming anecdote in his life. He hated the telephone. If any visitor would ask his permission to use his phone as they thought he would have one in his house, he haughtily answered: ‘If you fancy yourself at the telephone, my next-door neighbour possesses one such appliance.’ Genial. Just as well he didn’t live to see our mobiles.