 In 1935 he won a scholarship to study natural sciences at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he specialized in chemistry and graduated with first-class honours in 1938.He continued with physical chemistry as a graduate student, but transferred to mathematics at the end of 1940.As a student, he (along with three of his friends) became one of the first to solve the problem of squaring the square, and the first to solve the problem without a squared subrectangle.