topics: |  neuro | psychology

One of the most fascinating episodes in this utterly fascinating book:

	    In July 1971, Mrs B., who was in good general health and not
	given to 'hunches', had a sudden premonition of death, so clear and
	peremptory she phoned up her daughters: 'Come and see me today,' she
	said.  'There'll be no tomorrow ... No, I feel quite well ... Nothing
	is bothering me, but I know I shall die in my sleep tonight.'
	    Her tone was quite sober and factual, wholly unexcited, and it
	carried such conviction that we started wondering, and obtained
	blood-counts, cardiograms, etc. etc. (which were all quite
	normal).  In the evening Mrs B. went round the ward, with a 
	laughter-silencing dignity, shaking hands and saying 'Good-bye' to
	everyone there.
	    She went to bed and she died in the night.
			- p. 100


--

quotes this speech on mathematics:

Mathematics is not a book combined within a cover and bound between
brazen clasps, whose contents it needs only patience to ransack: it is
not a mine, whose treasures may take long to reduce into possession,
but which will fill only a limited number of veins and lodes; it is
not a soil, whose fertility can be exhausted by the yield of
successive harvests; it is not a continent or an ocean, whose area
can be mapped out and its contour defined: it is limitless ... its
possibilities are as infinite as the worlds which are forever crowding
in and multiplying upon the astronomer's gaze.
	- James Joseph Sylvester, Address at John Hopkins, 1977 [p.274]