Although we lived 5000 miles apart and couldn’t get together with any frequency, I felt very close to David and counted him as one of my best friends ever since Erika and I and our family came to Warwick for the academic year 1970-71. During that first year, he and Denise were our guides to the fine points of English life – such as how to rescue our puppy Toby from the constabulary and what to say when he bit the vicar’s leg. He showed us all the footpaths and led us on long walks, often through the rain. He and Elaine made the maths institute a uniquely welcoming place and were, I am sure, a major factor in its extraordinary success.

When he became a professional historian, we began a very enjoyable running argument which continued over two decades. I, as the died-in-the-wool mathematician, believe mathematicians in the past basically thought like I do; he, as a true historian, was always bringing up the things which they didn’t know yet and how much this changed the meaning of innocent sounding words. Of course neither of us budged an inch, but I do remember a minor victory when I showed him that Gauss used equivalence classes. My view of history was hugely expanded by these conversations. I loved it when he shot down my description of Pythagorus, based on Proclus, by informing me Proclus was a vacuum cleaner of old myths and lived 800 years later anyway. I had thought of Greek and Roman history as though it was a point in time.

Jenifer and I had a really wonderful canal boat trip with David and Denise and 2 other friends in Sept. 2001. It was in France and just after Sept 11. We were floating in a dream, reading the French papers every day to see if the world had ended but also feasting and drinking the products of Cognac. He had had his operation but was game for everything and as full of his dry humor as ever. At the end, we vowed to repeat the trip but this was the last time we saw him.

David Mumford

Here is an excerpt from a poem he and Denise wrote about this trip: