| Authorised form of name | Coxeter; Harold Scott MacDonald (1907 - 2003) |
| Other forms of name | Donald |
| Dates | 1907 - 2003 |
| Nationality | British |
| Place of birth | Kensington, London, England |
| Date of birth | 09/02/1907 |
| Place of death | Toronto, Ontario |
| Date of death | 31/03/2003 |
| Research field | Geometry |
| Activity | Education:
King Alfred School, Hampstead; St George's School, Harpenden; private maths tutor; Trinity College, Cambridge selected to attend Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophy of mathematics lectures (1926); PhD, University of Cambridge (1931)
Career:
Research Fellow, Trinity College, Cambridge (1931-1936) including two years as Rockefeller Foundation Fellow and then J E Procter Fellow, Princeton University; Assistant Professor, Faculty of the Department of Mathematics, Toronto University (1936-1943), Associate Professor (1943-1948), Professor (1948-1980); editor, Canadian Journal of Mathematics (1948-1957); visiting professor at universities in Britain, the Netherlands, Italy, Australia and the United States; addressed the conference in honour of Janos Bolyai on Hyperbolic Geometry in Budapest (July 2002); honorary doctorates from universities in Canada and Germany; CRM/Fields Institute Prize (1995); Distinguished Service Award of the Canadian Mathematical Society (1997); Honorary Fellow, Trinity College, Cambridge (2001)
Honours:
Companion of the Order of Canada (CC) 1997; FRSCanada (1948); President, Canadian Mathematical Society (1962-1963); Vice-President American Mathematical Society (1968); president of the International Congress of Mathematics in Vancouver (1974); Foreign Member American Academy of Arts and Sciences |
| Membership category | Fellow |
| Date of election | 16/03/1950 |
| Age at election | 43 |
| RSActivity | Medals and prizes:
Sylvester Medal 1997 |
| Relationships | Married (1936) Hendrina Brouwer (d 1999) |
| Source | Obituaries:
Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 2006 vol 52 pp 45-66, plate, by Siobhan Roberts and Asia Ivic Weiss
The Guardian (25 April 2003); The Independent (03 April 2003; 15 April 2003); The Times (14 April 2003) |
| Code | NA4835 |
Archives associated with this Fellow
| RefNo | Title | Date |
| EC/1950/08 | Coxeter, Harold Scott MacDonald: certificate of election to the Royal Society | |
| RR/72/78 | Referee's report by John Henry Constantine Whitehead, on a paper 'World-structure and non-Euclidean honeycombs' by Harold Scott Macdonald Coxeter and G J Whitrow | 1949 |
| IM/000979 | Coxeter, Harold Scott Macdonald | 1948 |
| IM/GA/SGRS/8387 | Coxeter, Harold Scott MacDonald | 1985 |
| RR/39/54 | Referee's report by Godfrey Harold Hardy, on a paper 'The polytopes with regular-prismatic vertex figures' by Harold Scott Macdonald Coxeter | [February 1930] |
| RR/39/55 | Referee's report by Herbert William Richmond, on a paper 'The polytopes with regular-prismatic vertex figures' by Harold Scott Macdonald Coxeter | [January 1930] |
| RR/79/160 | Letter from William Vallance Douglas Hodge, on a paper 'Uniform polyhedra' by Harold Scott Macdonald Coxeter, Michael Selwyn Longuet-Higgins and J C P Miller | 12 July 1953 |
| RR/79/159 | Referee's report by John Arthur Todd, on a paper 'Uniform polyhedra' by Harold Scott Macdonald Coxeter, Michael Selwyn Longuet-Higgins and J C P Miller | 17 June 1953 |