My partner, Richard Phillips, who has died suddenly aged 67, was a polymath who studied psychology and became a brilliant writer of maths resources for children.
He was born in London to Bertha (nee Wells) and Charles, but the family moved to Birmingham when Richard was six and his father was appointed a lecturer in educational psychology at Birmingham University. Richard attended King Edward VI school, Birmingham, where he started a society in honour of Francis Galton, the Victorian polymath, an old boy whom he thought had not been sufficiently recognised.
He was an early student at the University of Sussex, majoring in experimental psychology. He then moved to University College London for a PhD in facial recognition, somewhat ironically as he found faces difficult to distinguish. Research in the legibility of maps was his next interest. Eventually he moved to the University of Nottingham Shell centre for mathematical education, where he became involved with computers in education. This was at the time when microcomputers were first starting to appear in schools. He was involved in designing maths education software, as well as going into schools to study this new technology in use.
Some of his software “apps” – designed before the term was coined – have been used and copied around the world. One of these, Eureka, uses the context of a man taking a bath to help students understand, interpret and create line graphs. One of the best examples of Richard’s creativity in designing software was L – a Mathemagical Adventure. Aimed at teenagers with low motivation for mathematics, this text game wrapped mathematical puzzles in an imaginative storyline partly inspired by Alice in Wonderland.
Later, stimulated by the expense of licences for still photos to use in more ambitious software, Richard began another creative strand of work, taking photos with embedded mathematical problems to think about. His book Numbers – Facts, Figures and Fiction (2004) gives a photo-cameo for each number up to 200 and many interesting ones beyond. His series of annual Problem Pictures mathematics calendars used a picture each month to pose a mathematical question for investigation.
In retirement in Badsey, Worcestershire, he set up a village website and helped to found the Badsey Society, with the aim of recording the history of the village and the market gardening traditions of the area. His other interest was family history, especially DNA inheritance. Finally, he returned to his love of maps and was busy plotting our area on OpenStreetMap.
Richard was an intelligent, quiet, kind and gentle man. He is survived by his son, Will, from an earlier marriage, and me.
