Harold Scott MacDonald Coxeter (nonfiction)

Harold Scott MacDonald Coxeter.

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.

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 (nonfiction).

In the News

• 

  Coxeter uses his famous loxodromic sequence of tangent circles to detect and prevent crimes against mathematical constants.

Fiction cross-reference

• Crimes against mathematical constants
• Gnomon algorithm
• Gnomon Chronicles
• Mathematician
• Mathematics

Nonfiction cross-reference

• H. F. Baker (nonfiction) - Doctoral advisor
• Geometry (nonfiction)
• Norman Johnson (nonfiction) - Doctoral student
• Mathematics (nonfiction)

External links:

• Harold Scott MacDonald Coxeter @ Wikipedia