Party candidate to contest the state seat of Rockhampton at the 1950 Queensland state election. Ron Diamond was narrowly defeated by sitting Labor member James Larcombe. Teaching methods After returning to Australia following his graduation from Caltech, Diamond opined that there were less opportunities for tertiary education in Australia than in the United States and that faculty members of Australian universities where more lenient than those in the US where he believed professors were expected to be more active in both teaching and research. Diamond was vehemently opposed to non-traditional ways of teaching maths. He described modern ways of teaching maths as "valueless" and "mathematically gobbledygoook", using the term "newmathania" to describe any abstract way of teaching arithmetic. In 1974, he wrote a letter to The Sydney Morning Herald in response to an earlier editorial about comments made by both Peter Karmel and Mark Oliphant regarding young people seemingly being pressured into pursuing tertiary education when some may be more suited to other career pathways. In the letter, he criticised what he described as "intellectual snobbery" in American universities and colleges, which he believed had negatively impacted modern mathematics, citing the Banach-Tarski theorem as an example of the "absurdity". In part he wrote: "It is incredible to the layman, but it happens to be true, that excessive intellectualism has (a) led much of modern mathematics into fragmentary investigations whose only conceivable importance for human affairs is to get the authors promoted and (b) produced the absurdity of the Banach-Tarski-Robinson theorem that a solid sphere of one-inch radius can be broken into five parts and the parts reassembled, without any magnification or distortion, to form two solid spheres, each of a one-inch radius." Diamond also used an article published by the American Mathematical Society entitled "Can Mathematics be Saved?" as an example of how "intellectual snobbery", "excessive intellectualism" and "fragmentation" had become an issue within the mathematics field. Diamond's letter attracted criticism from Dr Lawrence J Dickson from the Mathematics Department at the University of New South Wales. Dickson described Diamond's comments as "sneering" and took umbrage at Diamond's assessment of the Banach-Tarski theorem, writing: "He knows as well as I do that it is not "absurd" but closely reasoned with a valid conclusion about the limits of geometrical intuition." Personal life Diamond married American woman Dorothy May Kerns on 23 December 1949 in Pasadena, California, after which they began living