Walter Warwick Sawyer

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

Life and work

Sawyer attended with scholarships Highgate School and St. John 's College, Cambridge University, where he studied theoretical physics. In 1933, he received his bachelor's degree. After that, he was a lecturer at several British universities ( from 1933 at University College, Dundee, and from 1937 to 1944 at Manchester University ), and finally from 1945 Chairman of the Mathematics Department at Leicester College of Technology. In 1948 he became head of the mathematics department of the newly founded University of Ghana. 1951 to 1956 he was a professor at Canterbury College in New Zealand. He then entered the United States where he taught at the University of Illinois and from 1958 to 1965 at Wesleyan University mathematics education in 1957/58 and was made public by criticism of the practice of mathematics teaching. From 1965 he was professor of mathematics and mathematics education at the University of Toronto. In 1976 he retired and moved to Cambridge in England. There, he led and initiated numerous mathematics clubs for students.

Sawyer applicable in Anglo-Saxon countries as one of the outstanding mathematics didactics and popularizers of mathematics. His first book Mathematician 's Delight from 1943 was translated into many languages ​​and had a circulation of over half a million copies. Be treated using specific examples elementary algebra, logarithms, trigonometry, graphs, analysis, complex numbers. Already in the 1940s at Leicester College, he developed a mathematics curriculum for engineering students, which is primarily emanates in the doctrine of concrete applications. As a useful mathematics he sees primarily linear algebra, analysis and functional analysis.

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

  • Mathematician 's Delight. Penguin 1943, 1991, ISBN 0140130349th
  • Editor and co-author: Mathematics in theory and practice. In 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 paperback 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 Volume 4: A path to modern mathematics. Penguin, 1966 ( German: . A path to modern mathematics Klett-Cotta, 1973).
  • Introducing Mathematics Vol.3: The Search for Pattern. Penguin 1970.
  • An Engineering Approach to Linear Algebra. Cambridge 1972.
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