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 to take up the Chair of Pure and Applied Mathematics 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 3d 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, Bibliography of Non-Euclidean Geometry. St Andrews, 1911.
* D. M. Y. Sommerville, The Elements of Non-Euclidean Geometry (Bell's Mathematical Series for Schools and Colleges.) Ed. William P. Paine. G.Bell, 1914, 274pp
* D. M. Y. Sommerville, An Introduction to the Geometry of n Dimensions. New York, E. P. Dutton, 1930. 196 pp. (Dover Publications edition, 1958)
* D. M. Y. Sommerville, Analytical Geometry of Three Dimensions. Cambridge University Press., 1934. 416pp

External links

* O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Duncan MacLaren Young Sommerville", MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, University of St Andrews, http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Sommerville.html .
* Obituary, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Vol. 95, p. 330-331.
* Mathematics At Victoria In Retrospect - Notes for a talk to the Mathematics and Physics Society on 22 May 1974 by C J Seelye.