He wrote this marvelous paper about the Tauberian theorem, the (1/n) theorem, which tells that a series that is summable in the Abel sense, and has terms bounded by a constant times (1/n) is also convergent. So that was the big Tauberian theorem which Littlewood proved, and his way of proving it was again a tour de force done by invoking a completely unmotivated new parameter which turned out to be the key to the proof. And then in my existence as a physicist one of the things I did was to prove the existence of a ferromagnet in one dimension, which was something that hadn't been done before, and I constructed this ferromagnet - this was a very 'Besicovitchy', a sort of Besicovitch construction of the ferromagnet as a hierarchical array of spins which has a ferromagnetic transition from order to disorder in spite of being one dimensional. And then... but in order to prove the long range order - what I proved was that the long range order is discontinuous at the transition, that it goes discontinuously from having a spontaneous magnetisation to being disordered, so it means the ordered phase has a magnetisation which remains finite away from zero right up to the transition point. And to prove that, I used Littlewood's trick of bringing in a unmotivated new parameter - so it was a proof; although the construction was Besicovitch, but the proof was Littlewood. Anyway, so I dedicated this paper to him and it was written just, I think, 60 years after Littlewood's proof had been published and so I dedicated it to the 60th anniversary of Littlewood's proof. And I got a very nice letter from Littlewood in response, saying that as far as he knew that was the only time that a mathematician had actually celebrated the 60th anniversary of a proof.

[Q] But he also said very complimentary things; I mean it was the most complimentary statement made to him by anyone, am I right?

Yes, something like that which I doubt whether that was true, but anyway it was a very gracious acknowledgment. No, I was delighted that he was still around when this happened. Whereas with Hardy - of course Hardy died much younger, I was never able to thank Hardy for the Jordan's Cours d'analyse which I'm sure he actually put in the library, but he died before we could thank him for it.