Christopher Strachey: A Personal Recollection

摘要

At the beginning of the 1950s Christopher Strachey was teaching mathematics at Harrow, a traditional English public school. At the age of fourteen I, along with some 20 other boys in the Classical Lower Fifth, was fortunate enough to be among his pupils. We had already chosen the focus of our academic work—to specialise in the language, literature and history of the ancient Greeks and Romans. For us the study of mathematics was an option, unconstrained by any examination syllabus or any need to adhere to a predefined curriculum. Christopher treated it as a free-ranging exploration of mathematical ideas. He discussed Klein bottles and Moebius strips. He introduced us to some of Cantor's ideas about countable and uncountable infinities, to group theory and simple applications of matrix algebra. We explored binary notation and other number representations; we analysed the game of nim, and we went to see Nimrod, the Ferranti nim-playing computer exhibited at the Festival of Britain in 1951.