[Maths-Education] Sad News about Kath Hart

[Peter Gates]

Could the following message please be circulated?

Margaret Brown



I am sure that you will be sorry to hear about the death of Kath Hart on April 16th, from ovarian cancer. I will let you know what the funeral arrangements are when I hear.
She was aged 78, although she'd never really retired from maths education - she'd only recently returned from a trip to Bangkok where she'd been giving seminars for maths teachers.

Kath started as a secondary maths teacher in some tough London schools, then became a teacher trainer at St Mary's College Strawberry Hill, and involved in the first Nuffield Mathematics Project. She then went to the University of Illinois to get an EdD, and on her return took up a post as a researcher and later professor at Chelsea College London (which later merged into King's College London). She spent some time in Bangkok, became briefly an HMI, and finished her formal career as Professor of Mathematics Education at the University of Nottingham.

Kath has always been very involved and committed internationally, having been an early international chairman of PME, and having frequently right up to the end of her life run sessions for and supervised teachers and students from many different countries, either overseas or in the UK. Huge numbers of teachers and students, especially those from developing countries in Central and South America, Africa, South and East Asia, have been grateful for her wisdom and support.

Among researchers she is probably best known for her work on the understanding and learning of ratio, and for leading the final years of the maths team in the 1970s on the Concepts in Secondary Mathematics and Science (CSMS) project; she edited the resulting book 'Children's Understanding of Mathematics 11-16', which was to strongly influence secondary mathematics teaching in the UK in the 1980s.