Donald coxeter biography

Taking geometry into the realms of art, footballing, kaleidoscopes and relativistic quantum field theory

Donald Coxeter was one of the leading mathematicians, and perhaps the greatest geometer, of the last century. British by birth and training, he spent his working life in Canada, as a professor at the University of Toronto from 1936 until his retirement. His tremendous output, extending over 70 years, included 12 books -- at least four of them classics -- and some two hundred papers.

At two and a half millennia old, geometry has claims to be the oldest and noblest of the branches of mathematics. It was, with arithmetic and algebra, part of the core curriculum of school mathematics and especially of university mathematics until the middle of the last century, when it began to lose ground. Coxeter's best-known book, Introduction to Geometry(1961), was a deliberate and partly successful attempt to halt this erosion.

The Ancient Greeks were aware of the five "Platonic solid