Dr. David Pimm Professor Department of Secondary Education Faculty of Education
“I work mostly in the marshy borderlands between mathematics and mathematics education, running illicit shipments in both directions. It is only of late that I have come to appreciate the education in mathematics I received in England. This took place both at school (many things I learned how to do, including but not limited to integration by parts, I will never forget how to do) and at university just on the cusp at the end of the Bourbaki era. It has taken me thirty years to come back to work on those experiences, with all the challenges of selfrecognition that brings. The chapter for a book I am currently writing deals with this. I am both a writer and teacher involved with mathematics and mathematics education, drawing increasingly on linguistics and the fine arts to come to know what I will subsequently claim to know.”
One of the favorite lines I have written is:
“It is as if Euclid is turning his back on his audience, as jazz trumpeter Miles Davis used to do on occasion.”
“When I write, I sometimes experience what jazz saxophonists report, namely encountering the Websters, Parkers, Coltranes, Redmans, who have played the same instrument so well and still live within it.
Like the diary in the second Harry Potter volume, the blank page (screen) and pen (keyboard), is never really blank – it sucks you in as it has ghost-others before you and will likewise ensnare others yet to come within its thrall.”
“When I am writing, much of me wants to be not writing, which keeps me sufficiently out of the state of writing where I can be completely caught up in it.
When I am not writing, I remember the unalloyed pleasure of having finished writing something, and mistake it for the more mixed emotions of actually being engaged in writing something.”
“Writing is painful when the words resist or refuse to be summoned onto the page, like when comedian Eric Morecambe claimed „I was playing the right notes, just not necessarily in the right order.‟
It is also painful when I cannot quiet myself sufficiently to lure them into the grove.”
“Writing is joyful when I am lost in the writing, subordinate to it, when the present moment has faded sufficiently not to intrude.
My favorite writing place is at a Macintosh, because the mechanics of writing are subsumed by the technology and I can maintain the illusion that what is written will stay written.”