Person: Sawyer, Warwick
W W Sawyer was an English-born mathematician who is best known for his inspiring books on elementary mathematics.
Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):
- Sawyer was an active member of The Adams Society, the mathematical society at St John's College, named after John Couch Adams.
- 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.
- The Adams Society was not the only society Sawyer took an active part in, another being the Chess Club.
- We note that Paul Dirac was Lucasian professor of mathematics at the University of Cambridge, appointed in the year before Sawyer began to undertake research.
- Sawyer published Note on a paper of Bell and Wolfenden on electrolytic separation of diplogen in 1935.
- In the paper Sawyer confirms that γ is independent of the mass of the isotope with a more accurate calculation.
- In October 1935 Sawyer was appointed as an assistant to E T Copson, the Professor of Mathematics at University College, Dundee.
- At this time University College, Dundee, was a college of the University of St Andrews, so Sawyer was at this time on the staff of the University of St Andrews.
- The Mathematics department in Dundee that he joined was small with Copson as the professor, Frederick Bath as a lecturer, and two assistants, Sawyer and Cecil Gilbert.
- After two years in Dundee, Sawyer moved to the University of Manchester in 1937, taking up an appointment of Assistant Lecturer in Mathematics of Engineering and Physics.
- While Sawyer was at Manchester he published his first book, namely Mathematician's Delight (1943).
- Sawyer remained in Manchester until 1944, the year he published his second paper A property of certain differential equations.
- In 1944 Sawyer moved to the Leicester College of Technology where he lived at 12 Milligan Road, Leicester.
- In 1950 Sawyer moved to Canterbury College, Christchurch, New Zealand where he taught until 1956.
- After a year at the University of Illinois, Sawyer was appointed as professor of mathematics at Wesleyan University.
- 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.
- Dr Sawyer is a member of both the American Mathematical Society and the Mathematical Association of America.
- Warwick Sawyer was an extraordinary individual who was very much his own master.
- As well as his books, Sawyer wrote many papers on mathematics education.
- We note that Sawyer did not write exclusively on mathematical education during his retirement, publishing the papers Conjectures related to the Hilbert matrix (1986) and Quotients of moment functions (1993).
Born 5 April 1911, St Ives, Huntingdonshire, (now Cambridgeshire) England. Died 15 February 2008, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
View full biography at MacTutor
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Origin England
Thank you to the contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0! 
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- @J-J-O'Connor
- @E-F-Robertson
References
Adapted from other CC BY-SA 4.0 Sources:
- O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive
