Tribute to Dr Tony Gardiner and Professor Hugh Burkhardt

The first two months of 2024 saw the passing of two giants of mathematics education in the UK: Dr Tony Gardiner, who died on 22 January, and Professor Hugh Burkhardt, who died on 4 February. Both men made important contributions to the development of Cambridge Mathematics, which we acknowledge here with our deepest gratitude.

Dr Tony Gardiner

As a mathematician, educator and researcher in graph theory, Tony was an obvious choice as an advisor on the development of the Cambridge Mathematics Framework. He showed an interest in our work from its inception, and we came to rely on him as a ‘critical friend’ who would not only challenge our assumptions but would also provide useful counter-arguments and suggestions. His enthusiastic engagement with our highly detailed Framework content and research sources made him an invaluable and greatly appreciated reviewer of our work. The defensibility and robustness of the Cambridge Mathematics approach to learning mathematics is in no small part due to Tony’s contributions over many lively and fascinating discussions

Professor Hugh Burkhardt

Hugh’s role as the Director of the Shell Centre for Mathematics Education at the University of Nottingham meant that he was already influential on the approach to mathematics education taken by those teachers who would later become members of the Cambridge Mathematics team. As a mathematics education researcher with a focus on building a global professional community for educational design, he was ideally placed to support our consideration of mathematics education reform through better design for coherence across resources, curricula, professional learning and assessment. He brought to Cambridge Mathematics the benefit not only of his own experience, with which he was insightful and generous, but also the experience of many senior international educational researchers and designers; for us he was a nexus of professional connections which greatly expanded our horizons in the early, developmental stages. Together with his colleagues at Nottingham, Malcolm Swan and Geoff Wake, Hugh introduced us to the influential work of Lynn A Steen, ‘On the Shoulders of Giants: New Approaches to Numeracy’,¹ the scholarly imprints of which are all over the DNA of the Framework and our approach to mathematics. Their influence also led to our adoption and adaptation of the range and variety of student actions from Malcolm’s work on creating balance in classroom task design; the resulting task nodes have become a major feature of the Framework.

Reference:

Steen, L. A. (Ed.). (1990). On the shoulders of giants: New approaches to numeracy. National Academy Press.