Sir Wilfred Halliday Cockcroft (7 June 1923 – 27 September 1999) was an eminent mathematics educator from the

University of Hull The University of Hull is a public research university in Kingston upon Hull, a city in the East Riding of Yorkshire, England. It was founded in 1927 as University College Hull. The main university campus is located in Hull and is home to the Hull ...

Early life

He attended Keighley Boys' Grammar School, now called Beckfoot Oakbank, and studied Mathematics at

Balliol College, Oxford Balliol College () is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England. One of Oxford's oldest colleges, it was founded around 1263 by John I de Balliol, a landowner from Barnard Castle in County Durham, who provided the f ...

. During WWII he worked in radar.

Career

Mathematics report

In 1978 he was commissioned by the then

Labour Labour or labor may refer to: * Childbirth, the delivery of a baby * Labour (human activity), or work ** Manual labour, physical work ** Wage labour, a socioeconomic relationship between a worker and an employer ** Organized labour and the labour ...

government to chair a comprehensive inquiry into the teaching of mathematics in primary and secondary schools in England and Wales. The committee of inquiry produced its report in 1982, published as ''Mathematics Counts'' but widely known as "the Cockcroft report".

Examinations

From 1983 to 1988 he was Chairman and Chief Executive of the Secondary Exams Council.University of Hull
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Personal life

He married in 1949, with two sons, and later married in 1982. Cockcroft was knighted in 1983, and in May 1984 was awarded an

honorary degree An honorary degree is an academic degree for which a university (or other degree-awarding institution) has waived all of the usual requirements. It is also known by the Latin phrases ''honoris causa'' ("for the sake of the honour") or ''ad hono ...

from the

Open University The Open University (OU) is a British public research university and the largest university in the United Kingdom by number of students. The majority of the OU's undergraduate students are based in the United Kingdom and principally study off- ...

as Doctor of the University.

References

External links

* * Tony Crilly (2001)
Memories of Sir Wilfred Cockcroft 1923–1999
''

The Mathematical Gazette ''The Mathematical Gazette'' is an academic journal of mathematics education, published three times yearly, that publishes "articles about the teaching and learning of mathematics with a focus on the 15–20 age range and expositions of attractive ...

'' 85 (502), 72.
Obituary
''

Bulletin of the London Mathematical Society The London Mathematical Society (LMS) is one of the United Kingdom's learned societies for mathematics (the others being the Royal Statistical Society (RSS), the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (IMA), the Edinburgh Mathematical ...

'' (2005), 37, 149-155
Short biography, and account of archives at Hull University
Access to Archives {{DEFAULTSORT:Cockcroft, Wilfred 1923 births 1999 deaths 20th-century English mathematicians Academics of the University of Hull Academics of Ulster University Alumni of Balliol College, Oxford Mathematics education in the United Kingdom People from Keighley