| Part 1: Student | |
| Chapter 1: Reading and writing and 'rithmetic | |
| Words | 3 |
| Books | 5 |
| Writing | 7 |
| Languages | 9 |
| Numbers | 10 |
| Study or worry | 12 |
| Learning English | 14 |
| High school | 16 |
| Chapter 2: A college education | |
| Move to Chambana | 20 |
| How not to be a freshman | 22 |
| Trig and analyt | 24 |
| Calculus, and is there a doctor on the faculty? | 26 |
| Elementary mathematics and culture | 28 |
| Mathematical daydreams and BARBARA | 30 |
| All Gaul | 31 |
| A Bachelor Science | 33 |
| Chapter 3: Graduate school | |
| Statistics | 36 |
| The end of the affair | 37 |
| Matrices | 40 |
| The Dean | 41 |
| First class | 43 |
| Hazlett and Netzorg | 45 |
| Good morning, analysis | 47 |
| Why geometry? | 48 |
| Chapter 4: Learning to study | |
| Doob arrives | 50 |
| All work and politics | 52 |
| Born again | 55 |
| Other forces, other tongues | 57 |
| Prelims | 60 |
| For example | 61 |
| Statistics, no | 64 |
| Readings and ratings | 66 |
| Reprints: Doob's and others' | 67 |
| Study | 69 |
| Chapter 5: Learning to think | |
| Optional skipping | 74 |
| Roller coaster | 76 |
| Jobs, no | 78 |
| On my own | 80 |
| The end of an era | 82 |
| Chapter 6: The Institute | |
| The common room | 84 |
| The center of the world | 88 |
| Insignificant people | 89 |
| Work | 91 |
| Work and between work | 93 |
| A weak paper and a pretty good book | 95 |
| Collaboration | 97 |
| Measures and Harvard | 98 |
| Classical mechanics | 100 |
| Birthdays | 101 |
| Chapter 7: Winning the War | |
| Back home in Illinois | 105 |
| Meetings | 106 |
| Teaching at Syracuse | 108 |
| Research at Syracuse | 111 |
| Radiation Laboratory | 114 |
| Referee and review | 118 |
| From Syracuse to Chicago | 121 |
| Part II: Scholar | |
| Chapter 8: A great university | |
| Eckhart Hall | 127 |
| Days of glory | 129 |
| What makes a great university? | 131 |
| Teaching | 133 |
| Students and visitors | 137 |
| Chapter 9: The early years | |
| Guggenheim | 140 |
| Measure Theory | 143 |
| Master's exams | 144 |
| Judgments | 146 |
| Jimmie Savage | 149 |
| Students and courses | 152 |
| The beginning of Hilben space | 156 |
| Ph.D. students | 159 |
| The Cambridge Congress | 162 |
| Follow the sun | 164 |
| Chapter 10: Montevideo | |
| Where to go? | 167 |
| Saturation in Spanish | 170 |
| Room and board | 172 |
| Weather and climate | 177 |
| How to get a chair | 178 |
| Humanities and sciences | 179 |
| Faculty of engineering | 182 |
| Instituto de Matematica | 184 |
| Institute people | 185 |
| Teaching in Montevideo | 188 |
| Research in Uruguay | 191 |
| Spy. junior grade | 195 |
| Small memories | 197 |
| Chapter 11: The fabulous fifties | |
| Back home | 200 |
| Is formal logic mathematics? | 202 |
| Boolean logic | 206 |
| The road to polyadic algebras | 208 |
| All logic and all mathematics | 210 |
| Logic students and logicians | 213 |
| The passport saga | 216 |
| Service | 219 |
| Editing | 222 |
| How to be a big shot | 224 |
| How to be an editor | 228 |
| Recent progress in ergodic theory | 235 |
| Writing for a living | 237 |
| The Institute again | 239 |
| Boolean algebras and sets | 243 |
| Farewell | 247 |
| Part III: Senior | |
| Chapter 12: How to teach | |
| Shifting gears | 253 |
| The Moore method | 255 |
| Moore and covering material | 260 |
| How to be a pro | 265 |
| Musings on teaching | 269 |
| How to supervise | 272 |
| More Ph.D. students | 275 |
| Chapter 13: To Sydney, to Moscow, and back | |
| Sydney 1964 | 280 |
| Budapest 1964 | 284 |
| Scotland 1965 | 290 |
| Tourist in Moscow and Leningrad | 295 |
| Life with Anosov | 301 |
| Fomin and Gelfand | 304 |
| Mathematicians in Moscow | 308 |
| As others see us | 315 |
| Chapter 14: How to do almost everything | |
| Rejections | 319 |
| How to do research | 321 |
| The invariant subspace problem | 325 |
| Friends can help | 329 |
| How to recommend | 334 |
| How to advise | 339 |
| Honolulu, here I come! | 343 |
| Chapter 15: Service, one way or another | |
| Democracy ad absurdum | 349 |
| How to be a chairman | 353 |
| How not to be a chairman | 356 |
| Life in Bloomington | 363 |
| Indiana students | 366 |
| Committees of one: Wabash | 372 |
| Committees of one: Bulletin | 375 |
| The Monthly | 379 |
| Here and there | 383 |
| How to write mathematics | 390 |
| How to write about von Neumann | 393 |
| How to write history? | 397 |
| Coda | |
| How to be a mathematician | 400 |
| Index of Photographs | 405 |
| Index | 407 |