I first met him [at Cambridge] as his tutor. We remained close friends for nearly half a century. He used to come for tutorials with fellow student John Conway, which guaranteed the wit flying around, and I remember them as the most exciting tutorials I have ever been party to. David was generous and thoughtful, enthusiastic and sensitive to the feelings of others, and seldom angry. He was always interested in what you had to say to him, and his replies were always stimulating and often very amusing. He graduated with a first, and then stayed on to do research in analysis for two years ...

I realised it needed a person of very special qualities to manage it, and I knew that David was that person. He chose Elaine Shiels (now Coelho) to be the Centre secretary and, during the next 20 years they welcomed more than 1,000 long-term senior visitors to the annual year-long research symposia held at Warwick. They found housing for all the visitors, solved all their problems, talked maths with them and made them happy.

Fowler brought many special and unusual abilities to the task. His great interest in people, and in mathematics, and his mastery of many practical issues in the maintenance of good living conditions, enabled him to provide, with colleagues, conditions under which distinguished visitors created much new mathematics and proved many new theorems. As a result, there were, in almost every year during Fowler's first 25 years at Warwick, more mathematicians visiting the university's Mathematics Department than there were mathematical visitors to all other English universities combined - a remarkable record for a new university.

In 1977, when I began my first analysis course, it consisted essentially of a monologue by the lecturer, most of which was simultaneously written on the blackboard for us to copy down. ... I learned it reasonably well, but what has stayed with me after 20 years is much closer to what I met in a book I bought (for 55p, second-hand) before I arrived at university. In that book, David Fowler anticipated many of my difficulties. For a start, he told me what a lemma was! When he defined continuity, he first discussed some unsatisfactory, but more intuitive definitions. On the subject of differentiability he started with chords tending to tangents and the wrote "For what perverse reasons then, shall I shortly be giving a completely different, non-intuitive, non-geometrical definition? This, I know requires some explanation." I still have the book, its spine broken and with most of the pages loose, because it helped me understand analysis.

... difficulty in reading it, a combination of its length, its meticulousness, its minutely referenced notes, and the novelty, boldness, and revisionism of Knorr's point of view, as long-held and cherished opinions were subject to new investigation ...

It is often asserted that the discovery of the phenomenon of incommensurability led to a situation in which the early Greek mathematicians were unable to set the theory of ratio or proportion on firm foundations, within the means at their disposal, until the development by Eudoxus, in the middle of the fourth century B.C., of the proportion theory of Book V. I wish ... to query everything in this sentence except that which relates to the identification, dating, and attribution of Eudoxan proportion theory.

The author endeavours to fulfil this programme of his in his important book on the mathematics in Plato's Academy. The book comprises three parts: Interpretations (of the received Greek mathematics), Evidence (from the manuscripts through which it was transmitted), and Later Developments (of, among other items, continued fractions).

While the main contents of the first edition of this book may be highly controversial, in general they avoided polemic as much as possible. In parts of the new appendix, I go more on the offensive, and point out in more detail why I dissent from other more traditional views, and why I think that they may indeed sometimes be more speculative than my own.

Fowler's case against the usual story is complex. It involves a mathematical reconstruction, an assessment of the available evidence, a careful examination of papyrological evidence for everyday arithmetic in ancient Greece, and lots more. His book is an education in and of itself, leading us through various approaches to studying the history of ancient mathematics, and arguing forcefully for his version of that history.

Those around him were always struck by the grace and good-humour with which he bore his illness. It was typical of the man that he wrote a letter to all his colleagues, telling them of his illness and reassuring them that he understood their sympathy and that there is "no need to attempt to say anything if you would prefer not to do so".

David Fowler was a cultured man with wide interests. He made himself a clavichord, which he played softly, and he contributed a chapter to Music And Mathematics (2003). He was also a quiet but unwavering supporter of human rights, environmental and educational organisations and campaigns.