It's been decades since I read Surely You're Joking, and I've completely forgotten about that chapter. It plays no part in my conscious recollection of the book.

The episode that really stuck in my mind was the episode about his competition with the abacus-user, who was better at math, which essentially ends with him giving up trying to explain how he could mental math a cube root faster, because the abacus-user was just someone who couldn't understand a math explanation.