Person: Shephard, Geoffrey
Geoffrey Shephard was an outstanding geometer who wrote many interesting and important papers. His books, especially one co-authored with Branko Grünbaum on tilings, have become classics.
Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):
- In Leicester, Shephard attended Wyggeston Grammar School for Boys.
- This school, founded in 1876, had Thomas Kingdom (1881-1957) as headmaster when Shephard studied there.
- Shephard graduated from Wyggeston Grammar School in 1945 and, later that year, began studying mathematics at Queens' College, Cambridge.
- In 1951, Shephard was appointed to a Lectureship in Mathematics at the University of Birmingham but continued to undertake research advised by Todd.
- In collaboration with Geoffrey Shephard and James Taylor during that period his interest in convex geometry and Hausdorff Measure Theory widened.
- In particular, with Geoffrey Shephard, he produced sharp bounds for the volume of a difference body, a problem which had been open for 30 years.
- Soon after going to the University of East Anglia, Shephard began a collaboration with Branko Grünbaum and their first joint paper Convex polytopes was published in the Bulletin of the London Mathematical Society in 1969.
- The book that took Shephard and Grünbaum eleven years to produce was Tilings and Patterns (1986).
- Shephard had written another book which he had published well before Tilings and Patterns, namely the joint work Convex polytopes and the upper bound conjecture written in collaboration with Peter McMullen (born 11 May 1942).
- McMullen had been a Ph.D. student at the University of Birmingham advised by Shephard.
- When Shephard moved to the University of East Anglia in 1967, McMullen went with him.
- The prize, to be known as the Shephard Prize will be awarded biennially.
- Professor Shephard himself is Professor of Mathematics at the University of East Anglia whose main fields of interest are in convex geometry and tessellations.
- Professor Shephard is one of the longest-standing members of the London Mathematical Society, having given more than sixty years of membership.
- Shephard retired from his chair at the University of East Anglia in 1984.
- MathSciNet lists 48 papers written by Shephard (some are joint works) which were published between 1987 and 2016.
Born 16 August 1927, Manchester, England. Died 3 August 2016, Norwich, England.
View full biography at MacTutor
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
