Obituary
Dick Tahta
A maths teacher with gusto, he inspired the schoolboy Hawking
Geoffrey Hoare and Eric Love
Friday January 5, 2007
Guardian
Dick Tahta, who has died aged 78, was one of the outstanding
mathematics teachers of his generation. In a national advertising
campaign to attract recruits to the profession, the theoretical
physicist Stephen Hawking was among famous people asked to name one
teacher who had inspired them: "Mr Tahta," was Hawking’s response.
Dick was born in Manchester, where his Armenian parents set up home
after the first world war war. From Rossall school, in Fleetwood,
Lancashire, he gained a scholarship to Christ Church, Oxford, in
1946. Mathematics was his main subject, but he read widely and
intensively – English literature, philosophy and history – at a
formidable speed. A book a day was his norm for 60 years.
National service in the RAF (1950-52) was followed by six months in
Florence absorbing Italian language and art before finding a career
suited to his quicksilver intellect. First he tried journalism, which
taught him to write clearly and unpretentiously.
In 1954 he was invited back to Rossall school to teach English and
history.Gradually a few mathematics lessons were introduced, and Dick
found he enjoyed teaching them. He then took up the subject in
earnest, moving next year to St Albans school, Hertfordshire, where
Hawking was a pupil. During six years there, he married his wife
Hilary and began the sideline of restoring houses as his family
grew. His energy and capacity for hard work were daunting, and he had
a gusto that made students and friends feel more alive.
His reputation brought him the post of lecturer in mathematics
education atExeter University in 1961, and there he built up a
wonderful network of students and teachers in West Country schools. A
magical teacher, he enjoyed the lively interaction of the
classroom. His postgraduates found themselves making 8mm animated
films, exploring Dartmoor, and even baking as part of maths
teaching. He wanted to liberate the typical mathematics psyche,
sometimes trapped in narrow abstract byways.
His openness matched the openness of the 1960s, and his interest in
the creative divergent mind led him to experiment with contemporary
music and art. In the basement of his family’s Regency house in
Exeter, students and teachers could try their hand at sculpture and
painting.
Dick was a perfectionist: he used to laugh at his extreme tidiness and
perfect file boxes; then he would go off to read about problems of
consciousnessand the senses.
He was a leading member of the Association of Teachers of Mathematics
(ATM), propagating ideas and influence throughout his career with a
deep belief in the value of cooperative effort. Thus he was part of
the ATM collective which in the 1960s wrote the influential books Some
Lessons in Mathematics, Notes on Mathematics in Primary Schools and
Mathematical Reflections. He founded and edited the ATM journal
Recognitions, and was co-editor of another ATMpublication, Mathematics
Teaching, from 1983 to 1987.
>From 1960 until earlier this year, he wrote articles in mathematics
education journals. These and his book contributions reflected his
interests – Renaissance painting, church history, poetry and
linguistics among them. In 1972, from his work with local teachers,
he co-authored Starting Points, which became a seminal book for
mathematics teachers. Throughout the 1970s he gave much energy to
Leapfrogs, a group of mathematics educators who produced a range of
innovative teaching materials and went on to make a ground-breaking
educational TV mathematics series – first called Leapfrogs; later
Junior Maths – which ran for 12 years. He forcefully promoted visual
approaches to mathematics and was instrumental in getting
mathematical film more widely used -especially the geometric films of
Jean-Louis Nicolet and Caleb Gattegno.
Dick was part of the team that produced the ATM book Geometric Images,
and co-authored Images of Infinity for the Leapfrogs group. Geometry
was one of his enthusiasms and he eagerly embraced the possibilities
that computer software brought to its study. But the visual was always
a means to each learner’s inner world of mathematics. Dick had
pondered deeply the human side of mathematics, and brought to teaching
insights into the psychology of learning,whether of the active life of
young boys and girls or the emotional needs of adolescents, and his
eclectic vision embraced psychoanalytical approaches to child
development. In working with adults his awareness of group dynamics,
his ability to support others, and a continual questioning of his own
rolemade working with him a journey of discovery. At the end of the
1970s, the school of education at Exeter became a vast new
institution, and Dick took early retirement in 1981. He went to teach
in America and South Africa, and contributed to courses at Warwick and
the Open University.
Fascinated by minor Victorian amateur mathematicians, he delved into
the papers of the photography pioneer William Fox Talbot, who had
published mathematical results when younger. Dick’s last book,
published days before his death, was on another Victorian, the
clergyman and amateur mathematician ThomasKirkman, known for the
Fifteen Schoolgirls, a problem in combinatorics.
After some years in London, he moved to Bradford-on-Avon in Wiltshire,
where he lived, appropriately, in a weaver’s house. He was a star in
the local Shakespeare society, at Bath, and worked for Relate, the
marriage guidance charity, while Hilary practised as a
psychotherapist. Theirs was a marriage oftrue minds. In the last year,
he produced a thoughtful book, called Ararat Associations, linking
Atom Egoyan’s film Ararat (2002) with his own life andthe history of
Armenia. He was a wise and generous man who inspired love and an
increase of intellectual energy in everyone who came within his ambit.
Hilary died in 2000; Dick is survived by three daughters and a son.
· Dikran Tahta, mathematician, teacher and author, born August 7
1928;died December 2 2006
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