Dr. Chris Ormell

After university Dr. Chris Ormell taught for twelve years in three schools. He later worked in three UK universities (Leicester, Reading and UEA, Norwich) and two in Australia (Monash and Deakin). His work mainly concentrated on developing a new kind of curriculum material in maths. Since 1993, he has been Secretary of the PER Group (Philosophy for Educational Renewal) and founding editor of PROSPERO.

Abstract:
"Mathematics and the Imagination"

Most people take it for granted that mathematics is not a living subject. How could it be, since most of what you learn at school has been around for hundreds, sometimes thousands, of years? People also tend to go to the highest mathematical gurus to learn what it means. They are told that it is a higher intellectual artform which happens to have some low-level (ugh!), mundane, nitty-gritty uses. There was a rebellion in schools in the 1960s against this deadly image of maths. It took the form of trying to turn pure maths into a popular, anything goes, gamesy artform. But the rebellion failed when parents, employers and the media started calling the new work 'playmaths'. Actually there is another way. C. S. Peirce in the 1900s called maths 'The science of hypothesis', but his ideas were totally ignored by mainstream gurus. Peirce's long neglected thinking offers the answer. We can construct a 1001 exciting, realistic, practical hypotheses and scenarios, and then use simple maths to explore their human implications. These 'hypotheses' engage the imagination of the pupil/student, and this imaginative energy then rubs off onto the maths. At a stroke imaginative maths in school becomes visibly useful in a new, mentally stimulating, ideas-projective way. Taken seriously the aim becomes to meld maths and imagination into a single unified mental activity.

Imagination can only gain from the symbiosis. Many illustrations will be given.

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