Now I understand....

...what my late father was talking about -- sort of.  Everything in the universe was perfect, he used to say, which was why he was a devout Catholic, while at the same time a brilliant mathematician.  I couldn't understand how he could be both when I was a questioning teenager.  "There is so much we don't understand dear," he used to say, "but perfect math and numbers underpin everything, which means there has to be a God to have made it all so perfect.  Nothing is random."

Just watching 'The Code', a brilliant BBC series about how mathematical patterns and numbers govern everything in the universe.  And they are consistently uniform, regardless of whether applied to plants, animals, sea creatures, insects, people, flora, fauna or the planets and stars themselves.  Amazing!

Don't ask me to explain anything, but watching the series I am cluing in a tad.  I was terrible at math -- much to his patient and loving chagrin -- but I am now beginning to understand prime numbers and what they can and cannot do.  I also now have a clue about "pi", the infinite number formula.  My Dad lived in a "math" world and wrote about it every day of his life-- both before and after he retired.  He was not of "this world" and I think without my mother he would never have eaten, got dressed or left the house.  But she gave him an orderly life and he repaid her by pretending to be "normal".  A kinder, more patient and loving gentleman you could not meet.  In fact, I never saw him lose his temper or say a critical word about anyone.  Ever. 

He would have been 115 years old and I am only just figuring him out.