The principles of it
remained so foreign to me that I did not even recognise a right-angled
triangle, if the right angle were uppermost. It so happened that the
year before I had to sit for my examinations, a young University student
in his first year, who had been only one class in front of the rest of
us, offered us afternoon instruction in trigonometry and spherical
geometry gratis, and all who appreciated the help that was being offered
to them streamed to his lessons. This young student, later Pastor Joergen
Lund, had a remarkable gift for mathematics, and gave his instruction
with a lucidity, a fire, and a swing that carried his hearers with him.
I, who had never before been able to understand a word of the subject,
became keenly interested in it, and before many lessons were over was
very well up in it. As Joergen Lund taught mathematics, so all the other
subjects ought to have been taught. We were obliged to be content with
less.
Lessons might have been a pleasure. They never were, or rather, only the
Danish ones. But in childhood's years, and during the first years of
boyhood they were fertilising. As a boy they hung over me like a dread
compulsion; yet the compulsion was beneficial. It was only when I was
almost fourteen that I began inwardly to rebel against the time which
was wasted, that the stupidest and laziest of the boys might be enabled
to keep up with the industrious and intelligent.
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