At the age of 8, mathematics already had an intense aura of romance for me. I used to go round second-hand bookshops looking for mathematical textbooks that I could afford.

I went to a rather unusual school in Sunderland, where we studied all the academic subjects at full force from the age of eight on. Mathematics was already a subject of immense appeal to me; French I did badly at and saw no purpose in. If I had had a teacher of genius, who told me about, or even better, given me, a book on mathematics in French that was not available in English, my whole attitude to the subject would have been reversed. It was not that I consciously tried to neglect French; it was rather that the deep drive from the unconscious was lacking.

I remember conclusions I reached from observing my form master when I was eleven years old. He was a tall, gaunt man with a slightly unusual background, being a Canon in the Church of England and having at one time been in the Canadian Mounted Police. I remember him quoting something which I later discovered was from Ian Hay's 'The Lighter Side of School Life'. "In nine cases out of ten a schoolmaster's task is not to bring light to the path of an eager, groping disciple, but to drag the reluctant and refractory young animal up the slopes of Parnassus by the scruff of his neck." The implication seemed to be that we had a moral duty to work hard and that we were neglecting this. Whether children have such a duty is open to question, but one thing is certain - they do not feel they have. It is futile appealing to feelings pupils ought to have but do not. Again, still mourning our deficiencies, he used to say, "You can take a horse to the water but you cannot make him drink." At the time I thought, perhaps you could give him something that would make him thirsty.

With a view to stimulating discussion of Mathematical problems amongst members, a series of papers by gentlemen in statu pupillari have been arranged. On 16 November 1932, W W Sawyer traced the development of Wave Mechanics and the Hamilton-Jacobi Theory, and many interesting points, some quite original, were raised.

At the last meeting of the academical year, the retiring president of the Adams Society, W W Sawyer, gave us a most enjoyable paper on a subject which was most important for all present: "Learning Mathematics with the Minimum of Energy."

On 1 November 1934, W W Sawyer gave a lecture on "The Aims and Methods of Mathematicians." Describing his lecture as an analytic continuation of the one he had given in the previous Easter term, he dealt with the problems of the mathematical research student.

At the fifth meeting held during the Lent term the toast of "The Natural Science Club" was drunk in beer, provided to celebrate the holding of the fiftieth meeting, which took place during the term. Papers were then read by ... and W W Sawyer, B.A., on "Some Remarks on Biology, Physics and Philosophy."

Bell and Wolfenden have published a theory of diplogen concentration by electrolysis, which, to a considerable extent, explained the empirical result, that the efficiency of diplogen separation is constant. This theory depends on the assumption that a quantity, γ, introduced by Gurney is constant. In a later paper Bell writes that this assumption would "probably not be justified in a strict examination of the problem", but he gives no quantitative estimate.

The department at that time had a family atmosphere, decisions were taken during morning coffee, there were few official meetings, no teaching aids, no secretarial assistance, classes were small but teachers knew their students personally. Every member of the small staff might be called upon to lecture in any branch of mathematics, and Copson with his wide interests in mathematics was admirably suited to such an environment. Copson was generous in the help and advice he gave to new members of staff yet they were free to develop their interests both in teaching and research.

On the differential equation whose solutions are the nth derivatives of the solutions of a given differential equation.

The successive derivatives of the solutions of a second order linear differential equation with polynomial coefficients are the solutions of other analogous equations in which the degree of the coefficients is generally increasing. It follows that the n-th derivative equation in general presents apparent singularities. The following two theorems are established. (1) If the degree of the first coefficient is the same for all n, the equation has at most 3 effective singularities, one of which can be at infinity. (2) The apparent singularities are the roots of an equation whose coefficients are polynomials in n of the same degree as their weight.

W Howard Joint, head of the mathematics department in Leicester College of Technology, had come to the conclusion that we were trying to teach mathematics to engineering apprentices in a foreign language. Mathematics appeared in words and symbols, but the apprentices thought, so to speak, with their hands, by appreciating the sizes and shapes of actual objects. He began introducing physical objects into mathematics lessons. ... Shortly afterwards, I took over the department and together with some excellent colleagues carried the development to the stage where we could present almost every topic of the Ordinary National Certificate course by relating it to actual objects.

When I was at Leicester, a decision was taken by an industry that employed extremely unskilled workers to send their youngest workers to the College for one day each week. We believed that most of the boys and girls concerned had been very glad to escape from school and would not at all welcome a return to classrooms. On the first day of the new scheme, two of my colleagues were ill with influenza, so I had to take three classes of boys in a large room for the entire afternoon. In these circumstances I saw no prospect of teaching much arithmetic. I felt I would have done my duty to the College if I made sure they did not burn the place down, so I opted unashamedly for an activity period. I collected all the things I could find that would keep them busy and interested. Their reaction to this was so striking that when things returned to normal and I had only my own class to deal with, I had not the heart to return to chalk-and-talk.

The present book was worked out in a country where a great educational change was taking place. In 1948, the University College of the Gold Coast was founded. The students were keen and of first-rate ability. So far as inborn intelligence went, they were capable of becoming, within ten or twenty years, research workers in mathematics, university lecturers, professors. But of course there was no mathematical tradition in the country. That had to be created. It was therefore necessary to obtain a sort of essence of mathematics; to examine the life of a budding mathematician in one of the older mathematical centres; to study all the influences that helped him to grow; the atmosphere of school and college, countless hints, allusions, suggestions from older mathematicians and from books. From all of this to try to form some clear idea of what we were trying to do, what the qualities of a mathematician were, how they were to be stimulated.

For five years from 1951 he was at Canterbury College, New Zealand. He founded a mathematical society for high-school students, and this led to a significant increase in the supply of mathematics teachers in Canterbury province.

In 1957 I came to the United States on the invitation of some mathematicians who were launching the "Modern Math" campaign. They thought my book "Prelude to Mathematics" was a useful expression of the spirit of modern mathematics. Max Beberman was working on a series of textbooks expounding the approach of "Modern Math". These books were rather behind schedule and it was thought that as a writer I might help them to catch up by writing some books in the series. This was of course an illusion. I was appalled by their approach, which was the exact opposite of my idea of good mathematics teaching. ... It had been arranged that I should teach calculus to a class of first year students at Illinois University. There they accepted students who had graduated from high school. Sometimes this was not sufficient to ensure a successful college career and the first year to some extent served the purpose of an entrance examination. ... My assignment was to cover the first ten chapters of a particular calculus textbook. I imagine the normal procedure was to go straight through the book, giving tests in which students would receive grades A, B or C for partial understanding. I did not follow this procedure.

Lexington - Dr W Warwick Sawyer, Wesleyan University professor of mathematics, will lecture at Virginia Military Institute Wednesday evening in a program sponsored by the University Center in Virginia and Virginia Military Institute. Dr Sawyer will speak at 7:30 p.m. in room 111 of Mallory Hall on the topic, "A Pictorial Approach to Advanced Calculus." The lecture is open to the public. A native of England, Dr Sawyer joined the faculty at Wesleyan in Middletown, Conn., in 1958. Previously he had taught at the University of Illinois, Canterbury College in New Zealand, University College of the Gold Coast in Africa, and College of Technology Leicester, England. He is the author of a number of books on mathematics and from 1958 to 1961 edited the "Mathematics Student Journal" published by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. Dr Sawyer is a member of both the American Mathematical Society and the Mathematical Association of America. His lecture at Virginia Military Institute will be one of six at area colleges. On Tuesday (30 October) he will speak at Randolph-Macon College in the morning and at Longwood College that afternoon. Prior to his Virginia Military Institute engagement, he will lecture at Virginia Union University, and Thursday at Madison College and Randolph-Macon Woman's College.

He moved to the University of Toronto in 1965 and remained until his retirement in 1976, when he moved to Cambridge [England]. For the next twenty years, he met regularly with about five or six students aged about fourteen on Saturday mornings. He eventually returned to Toronto to be near his daughter, and died on February 15, 2008 at the age of ninety-six.

He was an Honorary Life member of the British Mathematical Association, a Fellow of the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications, and a member of the Edinburgh Mathematical Society, Cambridge Philosophical Society, Canadian Mathematical Society and the Ontario Association for Mathematics Education.

Warwick Sawyer was an extraordinary individual who was very much his own master. He was an independent thinker who was not part of any school of thought and who avoided bureaucratic entanglements, preferring to make his influence felt through the students he encountered, the books he published and the colleagues who respected him. In his dissemination of mathematics, he sought to make it intelligible to both the general public, as well as to students, who too often tended to take a formulaic view of the discipline. Long before it became common to do so, he produced books to this end that have stood the test of time and are still popular, witness the many translations.