As the date drew nearer, Daniel began to mention them more and more frequently to Isaac. Eventually they went to see Isaac Barrow, the first Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, because he was conspicuously a better mathematician than the rest. Also because recently, when Barrow had been traveling in the Mediterranean, the ship on which he'd been passenger had been assaulted by pirates, and Barrow had gone abovedecks with a cutlass and helped fight them off. As such, he did not seem like the type who would really care in what order students learned the material. They were right about that – when Isaac showed up one day, alarmingly late in his academic career, with a few shillings, and bought a copy of Barrow's Latin translation of Euclid, Barrow didn't seem to mind. It was a tiny book with almost no margins, but Isaac wrote in the margins anyway, in nearly microscopic print. Just as Barrow had translated Euclid's Greek into the universal tongue of Latin, Isaac translated Euclid's ideas (expressed as curves and surfaces) into Algebra.