Duncan MacLaren Young Sommerville

Duncan MacLaren Young Sommerville (November 24, 1879, Beawar, Rajasthan, India – January 31, 1934, Wellington, New Zealand) was 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 "3^d" geometries in dimension "d". He also discovered and proved the celebrated Dehn-Sommerville equations for the number of faces of convex polytopes.

References

* D. M. Y. Sommerville, "An Introduction to the Geometry of n Dimensions." New York, E. P. Dutton, 1930. 196 pp. (Dover Publications edition, 1958)

External links

*MacTutor Biography|id=Sommerville
* [http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-iarticle_query?db_key=AST&bibcode=1935MNRAS..95..330.&letter=.&classic=YES&defaultprint=YES&whole_paper=NO&page=330&epage=331&send=Send+PDF&filetype=.pdf Obituary] , Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Vol. 95, p. 330-331.