| Authorised form of name | Hodge; Sir; William Vallance Douglas (1903 - 1975); mathematician; geometer |
| Dates | 1903 - 1975 |
| Nationality | British |
| Place of birth | Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom |
| Date of birth | 17 June 1903 |
| Place of death | Cambridge, England, United Kingdom |
| Date of death | 07 July 1975 |
| Occupation | Mathematician |
| Research field | Calculus |
| Geometry |
| Mathematics |
| Activity | Education:
George Watson's School, Edinburgh; Edinburgh University 1920-1923; St John's College, Cambridge 1925
Career:
Assistant lecturer, Bristol (1926); awarded research fellowship at St John's College and an 1851 Exhibition studentship (1930); invited by Solomon Lefschetz, to spend a year at Princeton University, New Jersey, USA; returned to Cambridge (1932); university lecturer (1933) and fellowship (1935), Pembroke College, Cambridge; Lowndean Professor of Astronomy and Geometry in the University of Cambridge (1936-1970).
Honours:
Kt 1959
Awards/Medals:
Adams prize 1937
Senior Berwick Prize 1952
De Morgan Medal 1959 |
| Membership category | Fellow |
| Date of election | 17/03/1938 |
| Age at election | 34 |
| Proposer | Arthur Lee Dixon |
| Herbert William Richmond |
| John Edensor Littlewood |
| Andrew Russell Forsyth |
| Godfrey Harold Hardy |
| Joseph Henry Maclagan Wedderburn |
| Henry Frederick Baker |
| Edmund Taylor Whittaker |
| RSActivity | Royal Society roles:
Sec 1957-1965; VP 1958-1965
Medals and prizes:
Royal Medal 1957; Copley Medal 1974 |
| Relationships | Parents: Archibald James Hodge, searcher of property records, and Janet, daughter of William Vallance, proprietor of an Edinburgh confectionery business.
Spouse: (m. 1929) Kathleen Anne Cameron, daughter of Robert Stevenson Cameron, publishing manager of the Edinburgh branch of the Oxford University Press.
Children: One son and one daughter. |
| PublishedWorks | RCN 19323
RCN 19010 |
| OtherInfo | Distinguished as a mathematician and especially for the remarkable discoveries he has made in the region where geometry, integral calculus, and topology meet.
Developed the theory of harmonic integrals.
Known for the Hodge conjecture; Hodge dual; Hodge bundle; Hodge theory. |
| Royal Society Obituary or Memoir | Click to view (may be contained within a meeting notice, presidential address or list of death notices) |
| Related images | Discover a selection of related images in our picture library |
| Image | 
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| Source | Sources:
Bulloch's Roll; DSB vol 17 pp 425-430
Obituaries:
Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 1976 vol 22 pp 169-192, plate, by M F Atiyah |
| Code | NA2197 |
Archives associated with this Fellow
| RefNo | Title | Date |
| EC/1938/08 | Hodge, Sir William Vallance Douglas: certificate of election to the Royal Society | |
| PB/1/33/3/3 | Companion of Honour | 1965 |
| IM/002149 | Hodge, Sir William Vallance Douglas | nd |
| IM/002148 | Hodge, Sir William Vallance Douglas | nd |
| IM/GA/WS/1196 | Hodge, Sir William Vallance Douglas | nd |
| IM/GA/AR/7286 | Hodge, Sir William Vallance Douglas | nd |
| IM/002147 | Hodge, Sir William Vallance Douglas | nd |
| RR/70/210 | Referee's report by William Vallance Douglas Hodge, on a paper 'Matrices of integers associated with self-transformations of surfaces' by Thomas Gerald Room | 1947 |
| PB/9/1/101/2 | Royal Society correspondence | 1945 |
| IM/002150 | Hodge, Sir William Vallance Douglas | nd |
| RR/73/258 | Referee's report by William Vallance Douglas Hodge, on a paper 'On non-commutative algebra and the foundations of projective geometry' by Henry Frederick Baker | 28 October 1950 |
| 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/79/252 | Referee's report by William Vallance Douglas Hodge, on a paper 'Geometry in three dimensions over GF(3)' by W L Edge | 5 October 1953 |
| RR/73/284 | Referee's report by William Vallance Douglas Hodge, on a paper 'On the cardinal points in plane kinematics' by S C Steward | 25 November 1950 |