Happily I was one of his students (in high school). Already I had begun to wonder at the separateness of the various types of mathematics to which I had been exposed. At once my new teacher began to relate them. And a life-long friendship grew. Some of the girls made eyes (he was handsome, dark-haired, straight and trim). But for him teaching was strictly business - a human business that stirred my enthusiasm.

We have indeed several hundred so-called colleges but I doubt that if one half of the professors of mathematics in them could tell what a determinant is. All they want in their professors is an elementary knowledge of the branches they teach and the practical ability to manage a class of boys, among whom many will be unruly.

A loxodrome is a curve on a surface of revolution which meets the meridians at a constant angle. If the meridians and the parallels of latitude on such a surface can be so selected as to constitute a network of similar infinitesimal rectangles, the diagonals of these rectangles will give loxodromes.

In a series of four memoirs in the 'Journal de Mathématiques', Poincaré has, among other things, discussed the topology of curves defined by ordinary differential equations of a simple character. In a recent course of lectures Hilbert laid considerable stress on the importance of these results and exhibited an elegant method for obtaining them in the case of a differential equation of the form $\Large\frac{dy}{dx}\normalsize = \Large\frac{cx+dy}{ax+by}$. In the following paper I have shown how the same method can be used for an ordinary differential equation of the second order.

The house was constructed during the Berkeley building boom of the early twentieth century along with its neighbours at 2222 Piedmont (1908) and 2232 Piedmont Avenue (1909).

During three and a half weeks of the summer of 1926, I visited mathematics classes in Göttingen, Berlin, Dresden, Stuttgart, and Hamburg. This brief time sufficed to give certain impressions as to personality of a considerable number of teachers, their methods of teaching, and its effectiveness. These teachers, always well trained, were nearly always men and women of good presence and pleasing personality who had the confidence of their pupils, with whom the relation was rooted in the teacher's desire to be helpful. I saw no provision in any class for the separation, into different sections, of pupils of differing ability, as is done in English schools. While the better pupils are stimulated by the offer of more difficult tasks, the 'Arbeitsgemeinschaft' provides in the later years the fuller opportunity for gifted pupils. In it pupils who show especial interest in some subject of the curriculum may, under the informal guidance of a teacher, widen their knowledge and test their ability. Two factors which contribute to the excellence of the training in German schools are that mathematics is taught in close touch with physics, frequently by the same teacher, and, secondly, that geometrical drawing is taught through-out the entire nine years.

Charles Noble was a person of great charm. He grew up in an uncrowded society, of which he preserved the virtues. At once the stranger would feel at home in his presence. He loved the mountains of California. As a youth, he and his companions would tramp from Berkeley to the top of Mount Diablo, and back again next day. In the late nineties he made pack trips with the Sierra Club successively from north to south in the high mountains. Although severe arthritis forced him to discontinue these extended activities, he continued to enjoy with his friends the lodge of the Sierra Ski Club in winter and in July the tent camp on its forty acres of forest and flowers. The picture of Charles Noble will be found in the group photograph of the charter members of the Faculty Club. He was also a founding father of the Kosmos Club. To give of himself was his nature. For more than one generation he and old friends would meet for Thursday lunch at the University Club in San Francisco. The pre-Christmas gathering at his home was a notable occasion, because the friends of his youth were friends for life. He continued, however, to absorb new ones, some from among younger colleagues and from among our graduate students of mathematics. He added much to the happiness of these last during the time of their advanced study, and celebrated gaily with them their attainment of the Ph.D. degree. Friends, old and new, would come to his house in the late afternoons, to join him in anecdote, argument, and jollity.

In 1962, the year that Professor Noble died, his son [Charles A Noble Jr] sold the house to the University for $91,500. It was the last house on the block to pass from private hands into University ownership. By that year, the adjacent houses - 2222 and 2234 Piedmont Avenue - were already being used as offices, so acquisition of the Noble home would have filled in the remaining gap in University property ownership of the buildings on the block. It appears that the house was converted to offices soon after it was purchased by the University.