page_title: Magnus Wenninger
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: Magnus Wenninger / Career
caption_attribution_description: English: An artistic mode by en:Magnus Wenninger, including a subset of triangles of a {3,5+}_16,0, displayed at en:College of Saint Benedict and Saint John's University
context_page_description: Father Magnus J. Wenninger OSB was an American mathematician who worked on constructing polyhedron models, and wrote the first book on their construction.
context_section_description: When Fr. Wenninger became a Benedictine monk, he took on his monastic name Magnus, meaning "Great".  At the start of his career, Wenninger did not set out on a path one might expect would lead to his becoming the great polyhedronist that he is known as today. Rather, a few chance happenings and seemingly minor decisions shaped a course for Wenninger that led to his groundbreaking studies.
  Shortly after becoming a priest, Wenninger's Abbot informed him that their order was starting up a school in the Bahamas.  It was decided that Wenninger would be assigned to teach at that school.  In order to do this, it was necessary that he get a master's degree. Wenninger was sent to the University of Ottawa, in Canada, to study educational psychology. There he studied symbolic logic under Thomas Greenwood of the philosophy department. His thesis title was "The Concept of Number According to Roger Bacon and Albert the Great".
  After completing his degree, Wenninger went to the school in the Bahamas, where he was asked by the headmaster to choose between teaching English or math. Wenninger chose math, since it seemed to be more in line with the topic of his MA thesis. However, not having taken many math courses in college, Wenninger admits to being able to teach by staying a few pages ahead of the students. He taught Algebra, Euclidean Geometry, Trigonometry and Analytic Geometry.
  After ten years of teaching, Wenninger felt he was becoming a bit stale.  At the suggestion of his headmaster, Wenninger attended the Columbia Teachers College in summer sessions over a four-year period in the late fifties. It was here that his interest in the "New Math" was formed and his studies of the polyhedra began.
  Wenninger died at the age of 97, at St John's Abbey on Friday, February 17, 2017.
caption: An artistic model created by Father Wenninger called Order in Chaos, representing a chiral subset of triangles of a 16-frequency icosahedral geodesic sphere
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