About 1901 I saw something of a member of the firm which was laying out at South Harrow what is now known as the Piccadilly Line.

He explained to me how they marked out the central line and how on curves they used sighting posts well away from the central line.

Some children’s remarks are funny and some are sad, most people realise that, but what interests me most is their instructive value in showing us how to improve our teaching.

I remember once telling a class that I thought they ought to have learned one item in arithmetic before. Tom E., a bright little fellow, promptly replied—“Oh yes Sir, we did it before with Mr. H. last year, but as we didn’t understand it, we forgot it.” I asked him if he really meant what he had said! He looked at me puzzled, so I pointed out that he had said that if he didn’t understand anything, then he forgot it. The whole class laughed and agreed that generally speaking this was true.

The late Mr. A. S. Gosset Tanner conducted the Bureau for the Solution of Problems from 1928 almost up to the day of his death in 1953 and many members of the Association will remember with gratitude the help he gave so freely, and with undiminished vigour as the years went on. Mr Gosset Tanner kept files of solutions to the papers for scholarships in Mathematics at Cambridge colleges. These files have been kept up to date, and the solutions are available to any member of the Association who, after a genuine attempt to solve a problem, has failed or has a solution with which he is not satisfied.

The evaluation of moments of inertia of simple solids is frequently regarded merely as a convenient source of problems in the integral calculus. From the point of view of the student of dynamics it is, however, perhaps even more instructive to make these calculations without any actual integration, for in this way he may obtain a deeper insight into the physical significance of the underlying concept. Whether this be so or not it seemed to the writer an amusing task (performed during a moment of inertia caused by a bacteriological infection) to see how many of the well known formulae could be derived by such methods.

Recently I have been experimenting on the physical properties, dimensions and constants of hens’ eggs. During this work I have had necessarily to look up the formulae for areas and volumes of ellipsoids and to invent approximate formulae for use where the correct formulae entails the use of mathematical tables. I now give them to other students.

“The moral of this story seems to be that mathematical reasoning based on an axiomatic basis is not difficult, ….” “Modern mathematics is turning more and more to axiomatic methods, and there is a great deal to be said for introducing students to them at an early stage, when, I believe, they would take to them more readily, and enjoy them.”