HIS MOTHER taught him numbers before he went to school. First he learned the words, which he said as he unfolded, one by one, the fingers of his fists. He had different feelings about each digit. One was perfect and friendly. Its appearance resembled its meaning. Two looked more complicated than it was. At least if he drew it schematically, like a Z, and considered the middle line as a way to get from the top to the bottom lines it also resembled its meaning. Three was pleasing: its three points made it easy to understand and remember. He could add two threes by counting their six points. Four if he wrote it with an open top had four points. The system broke down with five, and five was hard to draw; but, since it was half of ten, quick and accurate things could be done with it. Six, although it was even, resembled an odd number because it was curved like three and five. Seven was the most difficult digit; it was hard to picture the number of units it represented: the best he could do was five units and two units next to them; it was deceptively simple to draw and somehow not to be trusted. He found eight appealing because it was paradoxical: it had the curves of an odd number, but because it was vertically symmetrical it was an appropriate symbol for an even number. The only way to deal with nine was as one less than ten, and, considering how high the digit was, he did well with it: two tens were twenty; therefore two nines were two ones less than twenty, or eighteen. This worked all the way up to nine nines: that is, nine nines were nine ones less than nine tens, or eighty-one. Zero, like one, was perfect. One day when he was five and confined to bed with a cold he recognized that the series zero to nine paralleled the series ten to nineteen, twenty to twenty-nine, and so on. He felt a great surge of power and wrote on a sheet of paper the numbers one to one hundred and fifty-one. Given time he knew he could continue creating numbers indefinitely. His mother checked the list for accuracy and showed it to his father that evening. His father was pleased and said that arithmetic had been his best subject in grammar school. Since his father had not gone beyond grammar school and since, as his mother said, his father was an extremely intelligent man numbers must be a large part of his father’s intelligence. Arithmetic became his own best subject in grammar school. His second-grade teacher announced at the beginning of the year that henceforth four was to be made with an open top. This suited him, but it disconcerted the other students; they had all been taught in the first grade to make four with a closed top. The thinking now was otherwise. He pictured a convention of grownups coming to this conclusion, probably during the previous summer. Because he had discovered the decimal system for himself he knew the relationships expressed in the multiplication tables, but the teachers insisted that he and the other students learn the tables by rote. As a result, when asked to multiply, he ran through the memorized tables and in time lost his feel for numerical architecture. In the first year of high school he was taught elementary algebra by a buck-toothed eccentric; the admixture of letters diluted the elegance of numbers, and mathematics became his poorest subject. By the time he had entered the army he had forgotten parts of the multiplication tables—six times seven, seven times eight, eight times twelve—and he did poorly on the army intelligence test. He went to his commanding officer, explained the problem, and asked to be retested. The night before the test, he wrote down the tables, working out some of them by addition, and committed them to memory again. Now his interest in numbers, beyond such practical uses as figuring household budgets and checking bank balances, is mystical. He is struck by the recurrence of mid-eighties and mid-eight hundreds in his life. His house number when he was a child was eight-forty; his high school was on Eighty-fourth Street; he got off at the Eighty-sixth Street subway station to visit his first serious girl friend; when the Dow Jones average of industrial stocks is in the mid-eight hundreds he feels he should buy or sell. He will buy an electronic calculator and play with it in periods of stress. The effortless answers it provides to arithmetic problems within its scope will relax him as watching sports had when he was younger. One day when he is haphazardly drawing square roots from the calculator and squaring them to determine the inadequacy of decimal approximations he will realize that from childhood he had unconsciously thought he could be and then could have been a mathematician, and he will now realize that he could not. This will be a relief to him. In his sixties he will wonder if the recurrence of numbers in the mid-eighties in his history will apply to the end of his life.