Dr. David Pimm

1
Dr. David Pimm Professor Department of Secondary
Education Faculty of Education
2
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
self-recognition 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.
3
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.
4
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.
5
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.
6
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.
7
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.