Father Hudson and Geometry

The moment is timeless, like mathematics itself. Father Hudson took a straight edge and chalk to the blackboard and with expert precision quickly drew a right triangle. And then he began to talk about Pythagoras and the square of the base and the square of the height and he talked about how the sum of these equalled the square of the hypotenuse. He talked about the proofs of the theorem. Then he talked about irrational numbers, when a base of 1 and a height of 1 produce a hypotenuse square of 2, and that raised the question of what is the square root of 2? Father Hudson was a mathematician, in love with his subject, and he was mesmerizing.

John Holland
Bellefontaine Graduating Class of 1967