◀ ▲ ▶History / 19th-century / Person: Sommerville, Duncan MacLaren Young
Person: Sommerville, Duncan MacLaren Young
Duncan Sommerville studied at St Andrews and then had a post as a lecturer there. He left to become Professor of Pure and Applied mathematics at Victoria College, Wellington New Zealand. He worked on non-Euclidean geometry and the History of Mathematics.
Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):
- Crystallography in particular appealed to him, and doubtless these possible outlets influenced his geometrical concepts and led Sommerville to ponder over space filling figures, and gave an early impetus to thoughts in a field he made particularly his own.
- In 1915 Sommerville left Scotland for New Zealand to take up a new appointment as Professor of Pure and Applied Mathematics at Victoria College Wellington.
- In 1919, when the professor of mathematics at Otago University suffered a nervous breakdown, a young student there A C Aitken was left without support and Sommerville began to tutor Aitken with a weekly correspondence.
- Outside mathematics one of Sommerville's interests was astronomy and he was a founder of the New Zealand Astronomical Society as well as being its first secretary.
- Sommerville worked on non-euclidean geometry and the history of mathematics.
- Books which Sommerville published were Elements of Non-Euclidean Geometry (1914), Analytic Conics (1924), Introduction to Geometry of n dimensions (1929) and Three Dimensional Geometry (1934).
Born 24 November 1879, Beawar, Rajasthan, India. Died 31 January 1934, Wellington, New Zealand.
View full biography at MacTutor
Tags relevant for this person:
Astronomy, Origin India
Thank you to the contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0! 
- Github:
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- non-Github:
- @J-J-O'Connor
- @E-F-Robertson
References
Adapted from other CC BY-SA 4.0 Sources:
- O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive
