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 was a champion of the classical approach to geometry, in a period when the tendency was to approach geometry more and more via algebra.
He studied the philosophy of mathematics under Ludwig Wittgenstein at Trinity College, Cambridge. He remained at Cambridge following his doctorate, then was a Rockefeller Fellow at Princeton University where he worked with Hermann Weyl, Oswald Veblen, and Solomon Lefschetz. 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. 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 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).
In 1997 he received Sylvester Medal from the Royal Society and was made a Companion of the Order of Canada.
Works
- Coxeter, Longuet-Higgins, Miller, Uniform polyhedra, Phil. Trans. 1954, 246 A, 401–50.
- The Real Projective Plane (1949)
- 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, , ISBN 0-486-40919-8
- The Fifty-Nine Icosahedra (with P. Du Val, H. T. Flather, J. F. Petrie)
- Mathematical Recreations and Essays (with W. W. Rouse Ball)
See also
- Coxeter group
- Coxeter number
- Todd-Coxeter algorithm
- Coxeter-Todd lattice
- Coxeter–Dynkin diagram
- Coxeter's loxodromic sequence of tangent circles
Further reading
- Roberts, Siobhan, King of Infinite Space: Donald Coxeter, The Man Who Saved Geometry, Walker & Company, 2006, ISBN 0802714994
External links
- H. S. M. Coxeter (1907–2003), Erich W. Ellers, Branko Grünbaum, Peter McMullen, Asia Ivic Weiss Notices of the AMS: VOLUME 50, NUMBER 10, PDF
- "The man who saved geometry: Crying `Death to Triangles!' a generation of mathematicians tried to eliminate geometry in favor of algebra. Were it not for Donald Coxeter, they might have succeeded", by Siobhan Roberts, The Boston Globe, September 10, 2006
- Jaron's World: Shapes in Other Dimensions, Discover mag., Apr 2007
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