Duncan MacLaren Young Sommerville

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Duncan MacLaren Young Sommerville (November 24, 1879, Beawar, Rajasthan, IndiaJanuary 31, 1934, Wellington, New Zealand) is a mathematician best known for his work in multidimensional geometry.

Sommerville studied at the University of St Andrews. He taught there from 1902 to 1914. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1911. In 1915 Sommerville went to New Zealand for an appointment at the Victoria College of Wellington.

Sommerville most famous for his work on geometries in higher dimensions (in addition the classical geometries: Euclidean, spherical and hyperbolic). He found 3d geometries in dimension d. He also discovered and proved the celebrated Dehn-Sommerville equations for the number of faces of convex polytopes.

[edit] External links

  • O'Connor, John J., and Edmund F. Robertson. "Duncan MacLaren Young Sommerville". MacTutor History of Mathematics archive.
  • Obituary, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Vol. 95, p. 330-331.