Napoleon was so gifted in mathematics that he excelled in the subject from an early age. Later he said; 'To be a good general you must know mathematics,it serves to direct your thinking in a thousand circumstances.' He was helped by his prodigious memory. 'A singular thing about me is my memory,' he once boasted. 'As a boy I knew the logarithms of thirty or forty numbers. Napoleon was given permission to take maths classes earlier than the prescribed age of twelve, and soon mastered geometry, algebra and trigonometry. His weakest subject was German, which he never mastered; another weak subject, surprisingly for someone who so adored ancient history, was Latin. (He was fortunate not to be examined in Latin until after 1780, by which time it was clear that he would be going into the army or navy and not the Church).