Editors' Note: This was the first of what was intended to be a series of such “testimonials” in the Magazine. It seems there was only one additional contribution to the series, What Mathematics Means to Me, by Lewis Bayard Robinson (25 (1951–52), 115). Bell was best known for his Men of Mathematics, but he was a prolific author of many other books and a significant research mathematician in number theory, algebra, and combinatorics. He wrote these paragraphs late in his career as Professor of Mathematics at Caltech. Bell died in 1960.

The Editor has asked for about 400 words on “what mathematics has meant to me.” Notice the “me” — not someone else. This will account for all the “I” and “me” in what follows, for which I apologise. I am as embarrassed as if I had inadvertently stood up in church to tell the congregation how and why I had been saved. You may be even more embarrassed in witnessing my testimony.

My interest in mathematics began with two school prizes, one in Greek, the other for physical laboratory, both richly bound in full calf. The Greek Prize was Clerk Maxwell's classic on electricity and magnetism, the other, Homer's Odyssey. My cousin got the prize for Greek, I got the other. He read mine, I tried, and failed, to read his. The integral signs were particularly baffling to one who had not gone beyond the binomial theorem for a positive integral exponent.