I have been a teacher all my life but never have I given lessons to anybody, not even my children, and as for wisdom, I claim none. As you can see, gentle reader, the title is very enticing but entails a contradiction in terms: if I were prepared to give life lessons and pretend to spread wisdom around I would not be worthwhile listening to. Sorry if I disappoint you, but I can claim as much credit for my life as a lottery winner can for having money. I have just been extremely lucky: I have never been depressed for more than a few hours, even when faced with serious problems. I just tossed around in bed and next morning I was ready to solve my problems rather than moaning about them. And I never ever took a sleeping pill or a tranquillizer. All this is not wisdom, it is simply that life forced me to learn how to survive. And survive I had to, as you will see.
In 1929 in Buenos Aires, where I was born, I was 5 and saw my father die, aged 39. Mother was 37 and was left with very little money and four children. She was a puritan and money or no money we had to go to University in due course. So, we all worked desperately hard to get a bit of money for the family and to have good enough marks to be exempted from fees. I was the youngest and at 15 taught mathematics to children of 12, to get a bit of pocket money and help my mother (who worked full-time as a secretary) to pay the rent. It was all work and no play, except that I was lucky enough to have a very rich distant relative who had a ranch, where I was taken during the summer vacation to relieve my mother from one more mouth to feed. So, I learned to ride horses although I was not a strong lad: I could never run 200 yards, although I could play tennis for hours on end. (My heart that has served me well these last 94 years is not all that perfect.)
Now University time came and therefore decision time. My favourite subjects at school had been philosophy and mathematics. Physics I wanted to understand because I wanted to understand the world. All this a pipe dream, no way a boy with no money could survive in Buenos Aires on those professions. So, I had to opt for chemistry: my mother and my elder brothers would not accept anything else. I did not complain, it was not worth the effort. But it meant that I had to go to all courses in mathematics and physics unofficially and graduate in chemistry with top marks so that I could get a scholarship to England to learn what I could not in Argentina. And so I did. I was very lucky, I had learnt German so that I could read the most important book on the new mathematics and although I came to London in fear and trembling I struck gold in my first week as a graduate student. And then another crossroads: after three months, my marvellous supervisor gave me a problem that I knew from the beginning could not be done, because on using the crude mechanical calculators available at the time it was impossible to achieve sufficient accuracy to compute what was sure to be a minute magnitude. Again, it was not worth complaining: I did the work, but in my own time I did my own work and published three or four papers and got my Ph D.
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