I attended several seminars and talks at the Institut Poincaré and at the Sorbonne. At the first seminar, a young Frenchman named De Possel happened to be talking about one of my results. It made me swell with pride. (De Possel is still teaching in Paris.) I was invited to give a talk in a salle named after the mathematician Hermite, another in the salle Darboux. These halls and streets such as Rue Laplace, Rue Monge, Rue Euler, visible signs that the abstractions worked on by mathematicians were somehow appreciated, became heady wine and added to my general state of euphoria. In my youthful way I wondered, "If only some day a hundred years from now, a little street or even an alley could be named after me."
In October I decided to go to Cambridge, England. Steinhaus had given me a letter of introduction to Professor G. H. Hardy, a legendary figure in mathematics. In Lwów his discoveries in the theory of numbers were well known, and my friend Schreier used to present his papers in seminars. Stories about Hardy's eccentricities were widely told.
I found that belonging to the upper middle class did often facilitate things in England. In Dover, when, by mistake, I left the boat through the wrong door, two British plainsclothesmen intercepted me and wanted to know where I was going. I must have looked younger than my twenty-five years for one of them asked me what my father's occupation was. When I replied that he was a barrister, the man turned to his partner and said in a typically British way: "He is all right, his father is a barrister." I thought it was very comical that they took my word so easily for this piece of information.
After a few hours in London, I took an evening train for Cambridge. The train stopped every few minutes at stations, all in the dark, whose names were not visible. I asked a young man in my compartment: "How can you tell when it is Cambridge?'' He thought for a moment and replied: "I am afraid you can't." After another silence, I tried to start a new conversation by asking him what he thought about the political situation and whether he thought England would intervene in the Ruhr and help France. He pondered again for a minute or two and answered: "I am afraid not!" I was absolutely delighted by what seemed to me such very, very British utterances. As my knowledge of British mores derived mainly from Dorothy Sayers and Agatha Christie novels, somehow this fitted in.
I got off at Cambridge and went to a hotel called the Garden House which had been recommended by Grossman in Zürich. Since my father was financing my travels, each week I received five or ten pounds at Barclay's bank from my uncle's bank in Lwów. In those days this was almost affluence. I walked around Cambridge, admiring the University buildings and looking into bookstores. (I already had a pronounced book-buying — or, at least, book-handling — mania.) The Sherlock Holmes and Conan Doyle atmosphere I saw in many places enchanted me.
I hunted up a few mathematicians. Besicovitch, a Russian émigré from the Russian Revolution, was one with whom I had corresponded. He had solved one of my problems which had appeared in Fundamenta and had published a paper on it. It was really the first non-obvious example of an "ergodic transformation," a mapping of a plane onto itself, in which the successive images of a point were dense in the whole plane.
Besicovitch invited me to visit him in his rooms in Trinity College. When I entered his place, he said nonchalantly, "Newton lived here, you know." This gave me such a shock that I almost fainted. Landmarks in the great history of science like this literally kept me in a state of excitement for the rest of my stay in England.
Besicovitch and I talked mathematics. I wonder if many older persons were accustomed to such young men coming into their rooms and abruptly plunging into scientific problems and theorems without even explaining their own presence or exchanging greetings first. My friend Erdös is still like that at the age of sixty. Von Neumann too, who was so urbane and interested in politics and gossip, would often shift abruptly from a general conversation to technical scientific remarks.
In several ways, my stay in Cambridge was one of the most pleasant periods of my life — intellectually and in a psychological sense. Besicovitch invited me to a dinner at High Table at Trinity College. This dinner was one of the high points of my entire life until then. Present were G. H. Hardy, J. J. Thomson, Arthur S. Eddington, and other famous scientists, and there I was, sitting only a few feet away. The conversation was exciting. I listened to every word. We sat under an old portrait of Henry VIII. Food was served in ancient silver dishes. I noticed that Besicovitch ate with an excellent appetite. After dinner we moved to another room, and he drank brandy after brandy, while the others cast furtive but admiring glances in his direction.
Hardy told anecdotes, one of which I remember. As a youth he was once walking through a thick fog with a man of the cloth and they saw a boy with a string and a stick. Hardy's clergyman compared this to the invisible presence of God which can be felt but not seen. "You see, you cannot see the kite flying, but you feel the pull on the string." Hardy knew, however, that in a fog there is no wind and so kites cannot fly. Hardy believed that, in mathematics, the Cambridge examinations called "triposes" were nonsensical. As a demonstration, he persuaded George Polya (who, if anything, was a master of computation and manipulation in classical analysis) to take the mathematics tripos without previous coaching. Polya supposedly failed miserably.
I met Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, a brilliant young astrophysicist from India. We had a few meals together at Trinity, where he was a fellow. He collaborated with Eddington for whom he had mixed feelings of admiration and rivalry. A year later, the vacancy in the Society of Fellows at Harvard which I was invited to fill resulted from Chandrasekhar's acceptance of an assistant professorship in Chicago.
We met again much later when he was a consultant in Los Alamos working on the theory of turbulence and other hydrodynamical problems. Chandra, as he is known among his friends, is one of the world's most brilliant and prolific mathematical astronomers. His books are classics in his field.
During this stay in Cambridge, Michaelmas term 1934, the university or the authorities of the individual colleges for women — Girton and Newnham — abolished the old rule which forbade men lecturers on the college premises. I was invited to give a seminar on topology. I was, if I am not mistaken, the first male in the history of Girton to cross its threshold to give a lecture.
Of all the scientists I had known in Poland, the only one I saw while in Cambridge was Leopold Infeld, who was a docent in Lwów. I knew him from our coffee houses, and we saw each other a few times in Cambridge.
Infeld was tall, well over six feet, quite portly, with a large head and a large face. He was Jewish, from a simple orthodox background. In his autobiography he devoted much space to a description of his fight to achieve an education and an academic position, neither of which was easily attained.
He was rather gay and witty. I remember what seemed to me a bright remark he made after a month's stay in England about the difference between Polish and English "intellectual" conversations. He said that in Poland people talked foolishly about important things, and in England intelligently about foolish or trivial things.
Infeld was a very ambitious man and had a colorful career. I do not think his talent for physics or mathematics was quite up to his ambitions. In Poland, I had had some doubts about his real understanding of the mathematics of the deeper parts of general relativity. Perhaps it was because of his rather limited background in fundamental mathematics.