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Siobhan Roberts
Every mathematical biographer faces the same vexing problem: Mathematicians spend their lives sitting at a desk and writing in a notebook. Occasionally they switch desks. There are exceptions -- Évariste Galois dying at 20 in a duel, John Nash succumbing to and subsequently emerging from psychosis -- but Donald Coxeter was not an exception. He earned his PhD, married his first girlfriend and settled into a professorship at the University of Toronto, where he stayed from 1936 until his death in 2003, at the age of 96. If there's an interesting story to be drawn from his life, it's a story about the history of ideas -- more precisely, about the history of geometry.— The Washington Post
Overview
"There is perhaps no better way to prepare for the scientific breakthroughs of tomorrow than to learn the language of geometry." —Brian Greene, author of The Elegant Universe
The word "geometry" brings to mind an array of mathematical images: circles, triangles, the Pythagorean Theorem. Yet geometry is so much more than shapes and numbers; indeed, it governs much of our lives—from architecture and microchips to car design, animated movies, the molecules of food, even our own ...