Veblen was a great advocate of getting together informally. His teas were in the same spirit. He believed in taking long walks through the woods to discuss mathematical research.

Well it was not exactly a dissertation in logic, at least not the kind of logic you would find in Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica for instance. It looked more like mathematics; no formalized language was used.

I was an undergraduate at Princeton, and I was pressed by the math department to go on to graduate school. Actually they gave me fellowships that paid my way, otherwise I would not have been able to continue.

I tried reading Hilbert. Only his papers published in mathematical periodicals were available at the time. Anybody who has tried those knows they are very hard reading.

Never had any mathematical conversations with anybody, because there was nobody else in my field.

I was generally interested in things of a fundamental nature. As an undergraduate I even published a minor paper about the Lorentz transformation, the foundation of (special) relativity theory.