WW Sawyer

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Walter Warwick Sawyer (born April 5, 1911 in London , † February 15, 2008 in Canada ), mostly cited as WW Sawyer or Warwick Sawyer, was an English mathematician and mathematics educator.

Live and act

Sawyer attended scholarships Highgate School and St. John's College of Cambridge University , where he studied theoretical physics. In 1933 he made his bachelor's degree. He was then a lecturer at various English universities (from 1933 at University College in Dundee and from 1937 to 1944 at Manchester University ) and finally from 1945 chairman of the mathematics faculty at Leicester College of Technology. In 1948 he became head of the math faculty at the newly formed University College of the Gold Coast . 1951 to 1956 he was a professor at Canterbury College in New Zealand . He then went to the USA, where he taught mathematics didactics at the University of Illinois in 1957/58 and from 1958 to 1965 at Wesleyan University , where he became publicly known for criticizing the practice of mathematics teaching. From 1965 he became a professor of mathematics and mathematics didactics at the University of Toronto . In 1976 he retired and moved to Cambridge, England. There he directed and initiated numerous math clubs for schoolchildren.

In Anglo-Saxon countries, Sawyer is considered to be one of the outstanding math didacticians and popularizers of mathematics. His first book, Mathematician's Delight , was translated into numerous languages ​​in 1943 and had a circulation of over half a million copies. Elementary algebra, logarithms, trigonometry, graphs, analysis, and complex numbers are dealt with using concrete examples. As early as the 1940s at Leicester College, he developed a mathematics curriculum for engineering students, which is based primarily on concrete applications in teaching. He sees linear algebra, analysis and functional analysis as useful mathematics.

In 1962 he gave a lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Stockholm ( Not modern, not traditional, but mathematics as a whole ).

Books

  • Mathematician's Delight. Penguin 1943, 1991, ISBN 0140130349 .
  • Editor and co-author: Mathematics in theory and practice. 1948.
  • What is Calculus about? New Mathematical Library, Yale 1960.
  • with L. Strawley: Designing and Making - a book for boys, girls and inventors. Blackwell 1957.
  • A Concrete Approach to Abstract Algebra. Freeman 1959 (German: A concrete introduction to abstract algebra. BI University Pocket Book 1970).
  • Maths Patterns in Science. American Education Publications 1960.
  • Prelude to Mathematics. Penguin 1955.
  • Introducing Mathematics Vol. 1: Vision in Elementary Mathematics. Penguin 1964.
  • Introducing Mathematics Vol. 4: A path to modern mathematics. Penguin 1966 (German: A way to modern mathematics. Klett-Cotta 1973).
  • Introducing Mathematics Vol. 3: The Search for Pattern. Penguin 1970.
  • A first look at numerical functional analysis. Oxford, Clarendon Press 1978.
  • An Engineering Approach to Linear Algebra. Cambridge 1972.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Sawyer, WW
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Sawyer, Walter Warwick
BRIEF DESCRIPTION English mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH April 5, 1911
PLACE OF BIRTH London
DATE OF DEATH February 15, 2008
Place of death Canada