Harold Scott MacDonald Coxeter

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Harold Scott MacDonald "Donald" Coxeter CC (February 9, 1907 – March 31, 2003) is regarded as one of the great geometers of the 20th century. He was born in London but spent most of his life in Canada.

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 met Maurits Escher and his work on geometric figures helped inspire some of Escher's works, particularly the Circle Limit series based on hyperbolic tesselations. He also inspired some of the innovations of Buckminster Fuller.

He studied the philosophy of mathematics under Ludwig Wittgenstein at Trinity College, Cambridge. He remained at Cambridge following his doctorate, then did postgraduate studies at Princeton University. In 1936 he moved to the University of Toronto, becoming a professor in 1948. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1950.

Coxeter, M. S. Longuet-Higgins and J. C. P. Miller were the first to publish the full list of uniform polyhedra (1954).

In 1997 he received Sylvester Medal from the Royal Society and was made a Companion of the Order of Canada.

Canadian author Siobhan Roberts's biography of Donald Coxeter, titled "King of Infinite Space: Donald Coxeter, The Man Who Saved Geometry" has just been published by Walker & Company (Bloomsbury) in the US. It will also be published by House of Anansi in Canada, Profile in the UK, Rizzoli in Italy, Nikkei in Japan, and Seung San in Korea.

[edit] Works

Coxeter, Longuet-Higgins, Miller, Uniform polyhedra, Phil. Trans. 1954, 246 A, 401–50.
The Real Projective Plane (1955)
Introduction to Geometry (1961)
Regular Polytopes (1963), Macmillian Company
- Regular Polytopes, (3rd edition, 1973), Dover edition, ISBN 0-486-61480-8
Non-Euclidean Geometry (1965)
Geometry Revisited (with S. L. Greitzer, 1967)
Projective Geometry (2nd edition, 1974)
Regular Complex Polytopes (1974), Cambridge University Press
The Beauty of Geometry: Twelve Essays (1999), Dover Publications
The Fifty-Nine Icosahedra (with P. Du Val, H. T. Flather, J. F. Petrie)
Mathematical Recreations and Essays (with W. W. Rouse Ball)