NOTES 89

Notes
102.01 Hoyle, Bondi and me: a memoir
In the late 1940s, not many households had television. People listened
to the radio, but local and commercial radio had not yet appeared, so the
choice for radio listeners lay between the BBC's Home Service, its Light
Programme, and the Third Programme which was considered the
‘highbrow’ option. One of the Third Programme's annual events was the
delivery, by an expert in his field, of a series of lectures which eventually
became the Reith Lectures, given weekly over a period of about eight
weeks. The day following one of the BBC lectures was often one of lively
discussion stimulated by the challenging ideas commonly presented in it,
and the lecturer was regarded in much the same way as a modern media star.
One of the earliest lecture series was given by a Cambridge astronomer,
physicist and mathematician, Fred Hoyle. As the abbreviation to his name
suggests, Hoyle was a down-to-earth Yorkshireman with an accent which
was a reminder in those post-war years of the broadcasts by the writer and
novelist J B Priestley: quite different from the home-counties accent of
broadcasters like Richard Dimbleby who covered events of state at that
time. At the time of his BBC lectures, Hoyle was a Fellow of St John's
Cambridge; from his early years at Bingley Grammar School, he had read
mathematics at Emmanuel, and during the war years he had worked on
radar, when he met Hermann Bondi.
Bondi was born in Vienna, and had come to Cambridge to read
mathematics in 1937, shortly before the Nazi Anschluss. He had been
imprisoned for part of the war as a ‘friendly enemy alien’ in the Isle of Man
and Canada, but had been released in 1941 to work with Hoyle (and with
another alien, Thomas Gold, who collaborated with both Hoyle and Bondi:
Gold plays no part in this memoir). Throughout his life, Bondi retained a
trace of his Viennese accent, and the discussions with Hoyle on the
cosmological topics which interested them both must have been a delight to
listen to. For it was cosmology, as well as war-time radar problems, which
drew the two (three, including Gold) together. Hoyle, older than Bondi by
four years and already established in Cambridge, must have dominated the
group, and it was he who was invited by the BBC to give his famous series
of lectures on The Nature of the Universe, published as a book by Blackwell
in 1950 and making him the nineteen-forties equivalent, perhaps, of today's
Brian Cox. The essence of his lectures was that matter was being continually
created: a hypothesis later rejected almost universally by physicists, but not
by Hoyle himself, who coined the phrase ‘Big Bang’ but remained
unconvinced by the evidence of the cosmological background noise
discovered some years later. His rejection of this and other evidence against
his strongly-held steady-state theory of the universe, together with his
forthright and argumentative manner, made him enemies within the
Cambridge and astronomical communities. He eventually resigned the
appointment that he then held as Plumian Professor of Astronomy and

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 90 THE MATHEMATICAL GAZETTE

Experimental Philosophy and returned to live relatively quietly in northern

England: quietly, that is, apart from the odd critical comment about matters
of scientific policy, about widely-held scientific beliefs that he regarded as
untenable, and about the lack of wisdom of the Nobel Prize committee.
Where do I come into this story?
When the war ended in 1945, I had just passed the eleven-plus and
started at a small country grammar school. It was a mixed school with about
three hundred boys and girls, most of whom left at sixteen after taking
School Certificate, to work in banks, legal and council offices, or their
parents' farms and shops. Only a few children stayed on to go to university,
and the opportunities for sixth-form study were limited and depended on the
ability and enthusiasm of a few inspired teachers of geography, history and
chemistry. Mathematics, physics and biology were not taught in the sixth,
except where mathematics was needed for chemistry. Throughout the school
science was not well taught, the only science option in the School Certificate
being a watered-down subject called ‘General Science’. All the boys ‘did’
woodwork, and the girls, cookery.
However, even in the lower-school years I had become fascinated by
mathematics in general and by the differential and integral calculus in
particular, falling in love with its symbols: the smooth, elongated ‘S’ shape
of the integral sign, shaped like the space in the body of a violin; the
angularity of the capital ∑ , denoting a sum of terms; and the ‘lim n → ∞’
by which a lumpy and discrete sum of products became transformed into the
smooth ‘ ∫ ’ of the integral. Whereas older boys in the sixth struggled to
understand Silvanus P Thompson's book Calculus Made Easy, I used to
head for the bookshops whenever my mother went to London on her twice-
yearly visits. So that the first of the two volumes of R Courant's Differential
and Integral Calculus that still sit on my bookshelf has, on its flyleaf,
‘Bought at Foyles, 10th Sept. 1951’.
At that time, I had no knowledge either of Sir Fred Hoyle, FRS, or of
Sir Hermann Bondi, FRS, except for the former's lectures on the BBC, and
the incidental knowledge that Hoyle and Bondi had collaborated. The
headmaster of my school was a Cambridge linguist in German and French
whose war-time experiences had left him with nervous or psychological
problems, but he knew that I wanted to read mathematics at university (at St
John's in particular, because Hoyle was there), although the school was not
able to provide adequate teaching for Cambridge Scholarship entry. But my
headmaster said that I should give him some pieces of my work − solutions
to questions from the Cambridge Scholarship papers, as I recall − which he
would send to Fred Hoyle (whom he knew from his own time at St John's)
for comment and an assessment of whether I should try the St John's
scholarship examination. As a test of my mathematical ability, this was
almost worthless, since I was able to choose the questions that I thought I
could answer.

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 NOTES 91

After an interval, Fred Hoyle returned my solutions, with helpful

comments of encouragement in the margins: “Yes, but what about using the
conservation of energy to get a solution? Try this ...”. The comments were
all written in his neat hand-writing, and he had read all the work that had
been sent to him from beginning to end. I marvelled that he should have
done so: that one of the leading mathematicians of his age should have taken
the time to read the unsophisticated mathematical scribbles of a sixteen-
year-old schoolboy whom he did not know, and was unlikely ever to know.
It was an act of supreme kindness, after which Fred Hoyle disappeared from
my life for more than thirty years.
In light of Hoyle's not unfavorable comments, I decided to try the St
John's Scholarship examination to be held in December. The problem was
that some of the papers were in branches of mathematics that I knew nothing
about: projective geometry in particular. I borrowed books from the local
Public Library and tried to make sense of the subject, working at home
through the dark months of autumn with increasing frustration and despair.
But I could make no sense of it, and there was no-one that I could ask for
guidance, or a pointer to which texts I should really be studying. Later, I
asked for a copy of An Introduction to Plane Geometry by H F Baker
(subtitled ‘with many examples’) as my State Scholarship Prize; I still have
this book, first published in 1943, and even now I find it unbelievably
unwelcoming and almost impossible to read. Baker had been Emeritus
Professor of Astronomy and Geometry at St John's, which is perhaps why I
thought it might be helpful, but it was not. When December came, I took the
freezing three-bus journey to Cambridge to sit the examination at St John's,
and of course failed it badly. It was a miserable two days for me, alleviated
only by a slight acquaintance in the Junior Common Room with a soon-to-
be medical scholar named Jonathan Miller.
Back at school, my helpful headmaster had disappeared, amongst
rumours of alcoholism and embezzlement. He was replaced, temporarily, by
a retired head from a well-known London school, who could see the
difficulties that I faced and removed them by contacting a much larger
grammar school some miles away with a strong sixth-form, particularly in
mathematics. Here I became one of a small group of boys being prepared for
admission to colleges at Oxford and Cambridge to read mathematics; one of
the group already had a scholarship at Emmanuel, where Hoyle had taken
his tripos. The sixth-form maths master was a recent Oxford graduate and
the headmaster was himself a mathematician who came to teach the group
when time permitted. As a result of my days spent at this splendid school, I
secured a place at Oxford, thereby abandoning hope of St John's and of
sitting at the feet of Fred Hoyle. But Oxford was very good to me and I had
a succession of fine tutors − Jim Mauldon, Jim Hammersley and, the South
African, Jack de Wet from Corpus, Trinity and Balliol respectively. At the
end of my final year, I married a nurse from London whom I had made
pregnant, a hormonal tidal surge having overwhelmed the steady flow
toward mathematical understanding. I was given a pretty fair second-class

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 92 THE MATHEMATICAL GAZETTE

degree, which was as much as I could expect given my limited mathematical

ability and commitment that was less than complete. After graduation, I got
a job which required me to spend a year at Cambridge (Fitzwilliam House,
as it then was) learning the trade of applied statistics which has stood me in
good stead throughout my working life: a life spent analysing and
interpreting data collected by other people, rather than pushing back the
frontiers of mathematics, as I had hoped as a schoolboy.
When I left Cambridge at the end of 1959 with a wife and child, I had
lost all contact with Fred Hoyle and had not even met Hermann Bondi. After
some years of financial difficulty I went to work at one of the research
institutes of the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC); during the
intervening years Bondi had been working his way through a number of
prestigious appointments as chief scientist to the ministries of defence and
energy, and director of the European Space Agency, but in 1980 he became
chairman of the NERC, which was where our paths finally crossed. At the
meetings of relatively senior staff which I sometimes attended, I saw the
light but firm touch of his chairmanship, and the good humour which was
his characteristic: when urging patience over what some regarded as slow
growth towards a scientific objective, he would warn − in his slight
Viennese accent − about the danger of pulling up a small seedling by the
roots to see whether it was growing.
Three years after Bondi took up his appoinment as chairman, there was
a press release about the forthcoming appointment of a new director for a
highly regarded NERC-funded research institute in the Lake District, and I
felt that I would gain experience of being interviewed by applying for it.
Unexpectedly, I was called to an appointment board consisting of four
Fellows of the Royal Society: two biologists and a physicist, with Hermann
Bondi in the chair. Much to my surprise (and the surprise of other people
too) I was appointed, and took up the post in September 1983. It was here,
after an interval of more than thirty years, that I finally met Fred Hoyle in
person. My research institute had a seminar programme at which well-
known scientists came to lead informal discussions about their fields of
research, and since Hoyle was living nor far away, he was invited to speak.
He touched on several contentious issues, one of which concerned natural
selection; he repeated his view that the probability of producing one protein
by natural selection was vanishingly small, similar to the probability of a
tornado blowing through a junk-yard to assemble pieces forming a Boeing
747. This was received with vitriolic scorn by the audience, some of whom
were also Fellows of ‘the Royal’, but Hoyle was unfazed by his reception,
clinging to his argument with the determination of a Yorkshire terrier. When
the seminar ended, it fell to me as director to give a vote of thanks to the
speaker; and it was a pleasure for me to mention how, nearly forty years
previously when his fame and reputation were at their highest, he had taken
time to read a schoolboy's inelegant solutions to some rather trivial
mathematical problems, and had given helpful and encouraging remarks on
them. Hoyle, of course, had no recollection of it.

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 NOTES 93

A few years later, he was dead, and Bondi had left the NERC to become
Master of Churchill College.
10.1017/mag.2018.10 ROBIN T. CLARKE
Avenida Venâncio Aires 1001/704, Porto Alegre - RS, Brazil
e-mail: clarke@iph.ufrgs.br

102.02 Minimal sets for congruence classes

Introduction
A natural number x is said to be a subsequence of another natural
number y if x = y or if x can be formed by deleting one or more digits from
the decimal representation of y. When this occurs, we write x y.
Let S be a subset of n. A minimal element of S is one which has no
subsequence other than itself in S. The minimal set M (S) is defined to be the
set of minimal elements of S. For example,
M (n) = {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9} ,
M (2n) = {2,
4, 6, 8, 10, 30, 50, 70, 90} .
Minimal sets were discussed in [1], which included important references to
[2] and [3]. A theme of [1] and of the related article [4] was the difficulty of
proving anything ‘structural’ about minimal sets and the reader was
challenged to obtain such a result.
On this point, the following can be claimed as an elementary but clearly
structural result which holds for all sets of natural numbers
M (A ∪ B) = M (M (A) ∪ M (B)) .
This result can help a little in finding some minimal sets. However, the
purpose of this Note is to examine minimal sets for congruence classes. For
these minimal sets we shall discover some much more interesting structural
relationships and use these to prove a result conjectured by Martin Kreh [4].
It may be of additional interest that this is an effective proof of Higman's
Lemma [2], for these sets.

Congruence classes
Henceforth in this paper, let m ∈ n and a ∈ z, 0 ≤ a < m.
Define [a] m to be the set of natural numbers congruent to a modulo m
and let M be the minimal set for [a] m.
Minimal sets for various congruence classes are found in [1] and [2].
For example,
a = 1, m = 4 M = {1, 5, 9, 33, 37, 73, 77} ,
a = 2, m = 5 M = {2, 7} .
In these examples the elements of M are relatively small. However, as a
simple example of how to produce large elements, choose m to be a prime
with 10 as a primitive root and let a = 10m − 2. The elements 10i,

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