kastors asked:
Hi Neil, who is better at maths, Aziraphale or Crowley?
Aziraphale. Definitely.
THE COCOA WAS A CONGEALED brown sludge half filling the cup.
Certain people had spent hundreds of years trying to make sense
of the prophecies of Agnes Nutter. They had been very intelligent, in
the main. Anathema Device, who was about as close to being Agnes
as genetic drift would allow, was the best of the bunch. But none of
them had been angels.
Many people, meeting Aziraphale for the first time, formed three
impressions: that he was English, that he was intelligent, and that he
was gayer than a tree full of monkeys on nitrous oxide. Two of these
were wrong; Heaven is not in England, whatever certain poets may
have thought, and angels are sexless unless they really want to make
an effort. But he was intelligent. And it was an angelic intelligence
which, while not being particularly higher than human intelligence,
is much broader and has the advantage of having thousands of years
of practice.
Aziraphale was the first angel ever to own a computer. It was a
cheap, slow, plasticky one, much touted as ideal for the small businessman.
Aziraphale used it religiously for doing his accounts, which
were so scrupulously accurate that the tax authorities had inspected
him five times in the deep belief that he was getting away with murder somewhere.
But these other calculations were of a kind no computer could
ever do. Sometimes he would scribble something on a sheet of paper
by his side. It was covered in symbols which only eight other people
in the world would have been able to comprehend; two of them had
won Nobel prizes, and one of the other six dribbled a lot and wasn’t
allowed anything sharp because of what he might do with it.


