by Paul Morand and Prince Antoine Bibesco to the English and French literary circles. He became a friend of Marcel Proust and a "piéton de Paris" with the poet Léon-Paul Fargue. A frequent visitor of Natalie Clifford Barney's literary salon, he also met most of the American "exiled" writers of the 1920s, but his chief interest was always the synthesis of high mathematics and poetry. After World War II, Ghyka fled Communist Romania, and was visiting professor of aesthetics in the United States, at the University of Southern California and at the Mary Washington College, Virginia. Ghyka published his memoirs in two volumes in French, Escales de ma jeunesse (1955) and Heureux qui, comme Ulysse… (1956) under the collective title Couleur du monde; a shortened and revised version appeared in English in 1961 as The World Mine Oyster. Ghyka died in London and was survived by his son, Prince Roderick Ghyka, and daughter, Princess Maureen Ghyka. He was predeceased by his wife Eileen, who died on 10 February 1963. Both Prince Matila and Princess Eileen are buried in Gunnersbury Cemetery, London. Their funeral monument was restored in 2010 by art historian Dr Radu Varia. Mathematical aesthetics In around 1900, Ghyka spent a year studying engineering at the École supérieure d'électricité de Paris, Whilst there he developed his own mathematical ideas on the relationship between thermodynamics and living matter, partly under the influence of Gustave Le Bon. He returned to mathematics around 1920 when Albert Einstein's theories were published, and over the next few years developed ideas on the mathematics of form which he published in 1927 as Esthétique des proportions dans la nature et dans les arts, and revised and expanded in his two volume Le nombre d'or. Rites et rythmes pythagoriciens dans le development de la civilisation occidentale in 1931. Ghyka developed a personal philosophy in which all living things were endowed with an energy and functioned with a rhythm related to that of the golden ratio. Further work was published in French as Essai sur le rythme (1938), Tour d'horizon philosophique (1946) and Philosophie et Mystique du nombre (1952), and in English as The Geometry of Art and Life (1946). Around 1945 Ghyka was offered a visiting Professorship at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles because the President of the University had read Esthétique des proportions, and this was followed in 1947 by a job in