In my working lifetime no one did more to keep the study of Greek mathematics alive than David, always on the lookout for new ideas and younger scholars, always insisting that old certainties weren’t quite as certain as we believed or at least wanted to pretend to believe. And few academics I have known were as alive as he to all aspects of life. I conversed with him at length on topics such as gears from the Greeks, industrial archaeology, old houses, male and female approaches to cooking, etc., etc. Always buoyant, always interested and interesting. Few of us count as irreplaceable even in a general sense. Even fewer are, as David is, absolutely irreplaceable.

Ian Mueller