Duncan Sommerville

Duncan M. Y. Sommerville
Duncan Sommerville
Born	24 November 1879 Beawar, Rajputana, India
Died	31 January 1934 Wellington, New Zealand
Residence	New Zealand
Citizenship	United Kingdom
Nationality	Scottish
Fields	Mathematics
Institutions	St Andrews University (1904–13) Wellington University (1913–34)
Alma mater	St Andrews University
Known for	Textbooks on geometry

Duncan MacLaren Young Sommerville FRSE FRAS (1879–1934) was a Scottish mathematician and astronomer. He compiled a bibliography on non-Euclidean geometry and also wrote a leading textbook in that field. He also wrote Introduction to the Geometry of N Dimensions, advancing the study of polytopes. He was a co-founder and the first secretary of the New Zealand Astronomical Society.

Sommerville was also an accomplished watercolourist, producing a series of works of the New Zealand landscape.

The middle name 'MacLaren' is spelt using the old orthography M'Laren in some sources, for example the records of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

Sommerville was born in Beawar, India where his father was employed as a missionary doctor by the United Presbyterian Church of Scotland. The Rev Dr James Sommerville had been responsible for establishing the hospital at Jodhpur, Rajputana.

The family returned home to Scotland, where Duncan first spent 4 years at a private school in Perth, before being sent to Perth Academy. He then studied at the University of St Andrews in Fife, where in 1905 he was awarded Doctor of Science for his thesis, Networks of the Plane in Absolute Geometry. Sommerville taught at St. Andrews from 1902 to 1914.

In projective geometry the method of Cayley–Klein metrics had been used in the 19th century to model non-euclidean geometry. In 1910 Duncan wrote "Classification of geometries with projective metrics". The classification is described by Daniel Corey as follows:

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