23 Facts About Duncan Sommerville

Duncan MacLaren Young Sommerville was a Scottish mathematician and astronomer.

Duncan Sommerville compiled a bibliography on non-Euclidean geometry and wrote a leading textbook in that field.

Duncan Sommerville wrote Introduction to the Geometry of N Dimensions, advancing the study of polytopes.

Duncan Sommerville was a co-founder and the first secretary of the New Zealand Astronomical Society.

Duncan Sommerville was born on 24 November 1879 in Beawar in India, where his father the Rev Dr James Duncan Sommerville, was employed as a missionary by the United Presbyterian Church of Scotland.

Duncan Sommerville's father had been responsible for establishing the hospital at Jodhpur, Rajputana.

The family returned home to Perth, Scotland, where Duncan Sommerville spent 4 years at a private school, before completing his education at Perth Academy.

Duncan Sommerville lived with his mother at 12 Rose Terrace.

Duncan Sommerville then studied mathematics at the University of St Andrews in Fife, graduating MA in 1902.

Duncan Sommerville then began as an assistant lecturer at the university.

Duncan Sommerville continued teaching mathematics at St Andrews until 1915.

In 1910 Duncan Sommerville wrote "Classification of geometries with projective metrics".

In 1910 Duncan Sommerville reported to the British Association on the need for a bibliography on non-euclidean geometry, noting that the field had no International Association like the Quaternion Society to sponsor it.

In 1911 Duncan Sommerville published his compiled bibliography of works on non-euclidean geometry, and it received favorable reviews.

Duncan Sommerville was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1911.

Duncan Sommerville's proposers were Peter Redford Scott Lang, Robert Alexander Robertson, William Peddie and George Chrystal.

In 1915 Duncan Sommerville went to New Zealand to take up the Chair of Pure and Applied Mathematics at the Victoria College of Wellington.

Duncan Sommerville became interested in honeycombs and wrote "Division of space by congruent triangles and tetrahedra" in 1923.

Duncan Sommerville used geometry to describe the voting theory of a preferential ballot.

Duncan Sommerville addressed Nanson's method where n candidates are ordered by voters into a sequence of preferences.

Duncan Sommerville was co-founder and first secretary of the New Zealand Astronomical Society.

Duncan Sommerville was President of Section A of the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science meeting, Adelaide.

Duncan Sommerville died in New Zealand on 31 January 1934.