OTHER RECENT BOOKS
PROFESSOR LiTTLEwooD is a very eminent mathematician, and has had, for forty-five years, the privilege of dining at the High Table of Trinity, where one's neighbour is quite likely to be a Nobel Prizeman or a member of the Order of Merit. It is perhaps unreasonable to blame an author for the modesty of his aim, but one cannot help feeling that in a partly autobiographical document he has not given us all that he might.
After this preliminary grumble, let us say that the oddities of which the book A com- posed are very good of their kind. Many of them relate to probabilities of events of one sort or another, a domain which abounds in the unexpected. Each time one of us draws a breath, it is highly probable that it contains some of the molecules of the dying breath of Julius Caesar; and the chances that a player ignorant of the rules of chess will defeat the world champion is found to be better than ten-122 to one. Compared to this, the probability that a well-known agnostic mathematician will join the Oxford Group is quite large. There are some surprising re-interpretations of famous incidents in the history of mathematical astronomy. E. T. W.
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