Dick Tahta
A maths teacher with gusto, he inspired the schoolboy Hawking
Geoffrey Hoare and Eric Love
Friday January 5, 2007
The Guardian
The final paragraph of the obituary below mistakenly referred to Dick Tahta as Richard. His first name was, properly, Dikran.
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.
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 at Exeter 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 consciousness and 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 ATM publication, 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 role made 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 Thomas Kirkman, 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 of true minds. In the last year, he produced a thoughtful book, called Ararat Associations, linking Atom Egoyan's film Ararat (2002) with his own life and the 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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