The Soviets didn’t start it. The brains of the great mathematicians Carl

Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855) and Lejeune Dirichlet (1805-1859), suitably

pickled, are kept at the Physiology Department of the University of

Goettingen, where both taught and died. Bernhard Riemann, the hero of my

forthcoming book, escaped this fate, prudently dying in an Italian vacation

resort, far from the scalpels of academic physiologists.