page_title: Duncan Sommerville
section_title: Work in New Zealand
hierarchical_section_title: Duncan Sommerville / Work in New Zealand
caption_attribution_description: English: DMY Sommerville, fellow member of royal society of Edinburgh. Pictured at the 1913 EMS colloquium in Edinburgh
context_page_description: Prof Duncan MacLaren Young Sommerville FRSE FRAS was a Scottish mathematician and astronomer. He compiled a bibliography on non-Euclidean geometry and also wrote a leading textbook in that field. He also wrote Introduction to the Geometry of N Dimensions, advancing the study of polytopes. He was a co-founder and the first secretary of the New Zealand Astronomical Society.
  Sommerville was also an accomplished watercolourist, producing a series New Zealand landscapes.
  The middle name 'MacLaren' is spelt using the old orthography M'Laren in some sources, for example the records of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
context_section_description: In 1915 Sommerville went to New Zealand to take up the Chair of Pure and Applied Mathematics at the Victoria College of Wellington.
  Duncan became interested in honeycombs and wrote "Division of space by congruent triangles and tetrahedra" in 1923. The following year he extended results to n-dimensional space.
  He also discovered the Dehn–Sommerville equations for the number of faces of convex polytopes.
  Sommerville used geometry to describe the voting theory of a preferential ballot. He addressed Nanson's method where n candidates are ordered by voters into a sequence of preferences. Sommerville shows that the outcomes lie in n ! simplexes that cover the surface of an n − 2 dimensional spherical space.
  When his Introduction to Geometry of N Dimensions appeared in 1929, it received a positive review from B. C. Wong in the American Mathematical Monthly.
  Sommerville was co-founder and first secretary of the New Zealand Astronomical Society (1920). He was President of Section A of the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science meeting, Adelaide (1924). In 1926 he became a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society.
  He died in New Zealand on 31 January 1934.
caption: Duncan MacLaren Young Sommerville
exif: {}