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TITLE: Mathematics Teachers and Their Professional Development AUTHOR: Jana Pávová DEPARTMENT: Department of Education SUPERVISOR: Doc. PaedDr. Stanislav Bendl, Ph.D. ABSTRACT: This thesis is focused on Mathematics Teachers and Their Professional Development. The thoretical part describes the Czech system of in-service education of teachers in the context of lifelong learning. It introduces its legislative classification and describes an alternative classification. The following part offers the list of information resources, which are useful for Mathematics teachers and the list of what the current offer of further education courses for Mathematics teachers is, including selfstudying activities. The relevant links are quoted in the appendices. The empirical part analyses, interprets and evaluates the qualitative research among Mathematics teachers, which determines their experience with in-service education/professional development, their attitudes and opinions in this field. Furthermore, this part analyses their attitudes from the constructivism in Mathematics teaching's point of view. KEYWORDS: Maths teacher, further/in service education of teaching staff, teacher's professional development, educational portals, the Union of Czech Mathematicians and Physicists, Maths competitions, constructivism in Maths...

In this thesis I present new insights into aspects of Peter Guthrie Tait's life and work, derived principally from largely-unexplored primary source material: Tait's scrapbook, the Tait–Maxwell school-book and Tait's pocket notebook. By way of associated historical insights, I also come to discuss the innovative and far-reaching mathematics of the elusive Frenchman, C.-V. Mourey. P. G. Tait (1831–1901) F.R.S.E., Professor of Mathematics at the Queen's College, Belfast (1854–1860) and of Natural Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh (1860–1901), was one of the leading physicists and mathematicians in Europe in the nineteenth century. His expertise encompassed the breadth of physical science and mathematics. However, since the nineteenth century he has been unfortunately overlooked—overshadowed, perhaps, by the brilliance of his personal friends, James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879), Sir William Rowan Hamilton (1805–1865) and William Thomson (1824–1907), later Lord Kelvin. Here I present the results of extensive research into the Tait family history. I explore the spiritual aspect of Tait's life in connection with The Unseen Universe (1875) which Tait co-authored with Balfour Stewart (1828–1887). I also reveal Tait's surprising involvement in statistics and give an account of his introduction to complex numbers, as a schoolboy at the Edinburgh Academy. A highlight of the thesis is a re-evaluation of C.-V. Mourey's 1828 work, La Vraie Théorie des quantités négatives et des quantités prétendues imaginaires, which I consider from the perspective of algebraic reform. The thesis also contains: (i) a transcription of an unpublished paper by Hamilton on the fundamental theorem of algebra which was inspired by Mourey and (ii) new biographical information on Mourey.