How David became a historian of mathematics.

In my first year at Warwick (1969/1970) I was asked by the School of Social & Political Studies (equivalent to a Sub-faculty in today’s arrangements) to chair a working party on whether the University should set up a Department of History & Philosophy of Science. We met several times, and wrote to all existing departments in the UK for their advice, especially with regard to potential problems of over-specialization. Despite our unanimous regard for the relevance of the history of science to the understanding of contemporary theories, we recommended that the University not pursue this line of expansion. (We received some informal congratulations on our non-imperialistic tendency.) The philosophy of science, we thought, should be taught by the Department of Philosophy. We did in addition recommend to the various science departments that each of them should consider encouraging an established member of staff to prepare and teach an undergraduate course in the history of their subject. Mathematics alone responded. I know of course that Christopher Zeeman was enthusiastic about the history of mathematics, but I always like to think that I had some small role to play in David’s inspired move into the history of mathematics.

Seminar in the Philosophy of Science

From November 1992 until June 1999 I ran a fortnightly seminar, in which David was one of the most regular (and most frequent) participants. He gave three talks

March 10 1993 Towards the Story of the Evolution of ‘Equivalence Relation’ and ‘Equivalence Class’

May 11 1994 Reconstructing Ancient Mathematics

May 20 1998 Did Pythagoras Prove that \surd{2} is Irrational?

The first of these was especially memorable. The meeting was due to close at 7.00pm, but because both David and I were going to attend a piano recital (John Lill, I think) at 8.00pm, the seminar continued for 45 minutes extra, a tour de force on David’s part.

David Miller