Donald Coxeter
| Harold Scott MacDonald Coxeter | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
February 9, 1907 London, England |
| Died | March 31, 2003 (aged 96) Toronto, Ontario, Canada |
| Residence | Toronto, Ontario, Canada |
| Fields | Geometry |
| Institutions | University of Toronto |
| Doctoral advisor | H. F. Baker |
| Doctoral students | Norman Johnson |
| Notable awards |
Smith's Prize (1931) Henry Marshall Tory Medal (1949) CRM-Fields-PIMS prize (1995) Sylvester Medal (1997) |
| Spouse | Hendrina, died in 1999 |
| Children | Susan Thomas, and a son, Edgar |
Harold Scott MacDonald "Donald" Coxeter, FRS, FRSC, CC (February 9, 1907 – March 31, 2003) was a British-born Canadian geometer. Coxeter is regarded as one of the greatest geometers of the 20th century. He was born in London but spent most of his adult life in Canada. He was always called Donald, from his third name MacDonald.
In his youth, Coxeter composed music and was an accomplished pianist at the age of 10. He felt that mathematics and music were intimately related, outlining his ideas in a 1962 article on "Mathematics and Music" in the Canadian Music Journal.
He worked for 60 years at the University of Toronto and published twelve books. He was most noted for his work on regular polytopes and higher-dimensional geometries. He was a champion of the classical approach to geometry, in a period when the tendency was to approach geometry more and more via algebra.
Coxeter went up to Trinity College, Cambridge in 1926 to read mathematics. There he earned his BA (as Senior Wrangler) in 1928, and his doctorate in 1931. In 1932 he went to Princeton University for a year as a Rockefeller Fellow, where he worked with Hermann Weyl, Oswald Veblen, and Solomon Lefschetz. Returning to Trinity for a year, he attended Ludwig Wittgenstein's seminars on the philosophy of mathematics. In 1934 he spent a further year at Princeton as a Procter Fellow.
In 1936 Coxeter moved to the University of Toronto. In 1938 he and P. Du Val, H.T. Flather, and John Flinders Petrie published The Fifty-Nine Icosahedra with University of Toronto Press. In 1940 Coxeter edited the eleventh edition of Mathematical Recreations and Essays, originally published by W. W. Rouse Ball in 1892. He was elevated to professor in 1948. Coxeter was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1948 and a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1950. He met Maurits Escher in 1954 and the two became lifelong friends; his work on geometric figures helped inspire some of Escher's works, particularly the Circle Limit series based on hyperbolic tessellations. He also inspired some of the innovations of Buckminster Fuller. Coxeter, M. S. Longuet-Higgins and J. C. P. Miller were the first to publish the full list of uniform polyhedra (1954).
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