Professing

The "New Books" link in today's Arts & Letters Daily leads to a review of Andrew Delbanco's College: What it Was, Is, and Should Be . From that review—

Some, like Delbanco, remind us what the word ‘professor’ once meant: ‘A person who professes a faith, as in the Puritan churches, where the profession was made before the congregation as a kind of public initiation.’

I am not now, nor have I ever been, a professor.

I did, however, once profess the following:

(Click to enlarge.)

This 1988 letter advocated viewing pure  mathematics as one of the liberal arts. Twenty-four years later, that position still seems worth defending.

Arithmetic (i.e., number theory) and geometry are, by the way, two of the seven traditional  liberal arts.