The friendship is not shattered by these unhappy events, and Flowers's thoughts stray to Brown, with affectionate pity, as he drinks port and eats walnuts for the first time in Senior Combination Room. He was also unorthodox, eccentric, radical, ready to talk about anything.
The proof is by _reductio ad absurdum_ , and _reductio ad absurdum_ , which Euclid loved so much, is one of a mathematician's finest weapons3.
At twelve, in fact, he was given a scholarship at Winchester, then and for long afterwards the best mathematical school in England, simply on the strength of some mathematical work he had done at Cranleigh.
I do not know which of these views is nearer to the truth.
A very little reflection is enough to expose the absurdity of the 'literary superstition'. Information regarding prices, travel timetables and other factual information given in this work are correct at the time of first printing but Cambridge University Press does not guarantee the accuracy of such information thereafter. So there may have been a delay. We must guard against a fallacy common among apologists of science, the fallacy of supposing that the men whose work most benefits humanity are thinking much of that while they do it, that physiologists, for example, have particularly noble souls. In fact, Hardy was obliged to teach him some formal mathematics as though Ramanujan had been a scholarship candidate at Winchester
