Peter McMullen

Peter McMullen (born 11 May 1942)^[1] is a British mathematician, a professor emeritus of mathematics at University College London.^[2]

Education and career

McMullen earned bachelor's and master's degrees from Trinity College, Cambridge, and taught at Western Washington University from 1968 to 1969.^[3]

Contributions

He is known for his work in polyhedral combinatorics and discrete geometry, and in particular for proving what was then called the upper bound conjecture and now is the upper bound theorem. This result states that cyclic polytopes have the maximum possible number of faces among all polytopes with a given dimension and number of vertices.^[4] McMullen also formulated the g-conjecture, later the g-theorem of Billera, Lee, and Stanley, characterizing the f-vectors of simplicial spheres.^[5]

Awards and honours

McMullen was invited to speak at the 1974 International Congress of Mathematicians; his contribution there had the title Metrical and combinatorial properties of convex polytopes.^[6]

He was elected as a foreign member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in 2006.^[7]

In 2012 he became an inaugural fellow of the American Mathematical Society.^[8]

Selected publications

Research papers

• McMullen, P. (1970), "The maximum numbers of faces of a convex polytope", Mathematika, 17: 179–184, doi:10.1112/s0025579300002850, MR 0283691.
• —— (1975), "Non-linear angle-sum relations for polyhedral cones and polytopes", Mathematical Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, 78 (2): 247–261, doi:10.1017/s0305004100051665, MR 0394436.
• —— (1993), "On simple polytopes", Inventiones Mathematicae, 113 (2): 419–444, doi:10.1007/BF01244313, MR 1228132.

Survey articles

• ——; Schneider, Rolf (1983), "Valuations on convex bodies", Convexity and its applications, Basel: Birkhäuser, pp. 170–247, MR 731112. Updated as "Valuations and dissections" (by McMullen alone) in Handbook of convex geometry (1993), MR 1243000.

Books

• ——; Shephard, G. C. (1971), Convex Polytopes and the Upper Bound Conjecture, Cambridge University Press.
• ——; Schulte, Egon (2002), Abstract regular polytopes, Encyclopedia of Mathematics and its Applications, 92, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, doi:10.1017/CBO9780511546686, ISBN 0-521-81496-0, MR 1965665.

See also

• McMullen problem

References

1. Peter McMullen, Peter M. Gruber, retrieved 2013-11-03.
2. UCL IRIS information system, accessed 2013-11-03.
3. Peter McMullen Collection, 1967-1968, Special Collections, Wilson Library, Western Washington University, retrieved from worldcat.org 2013-11-03.
4. Ziegler, Günter M. (1995), Lectures on Polytopes, Graduate Texts in Mathematics, 152, Springer, p. 254, ISBN 9780387943657, Finally, in 1970 McMullen gave a complete proof of the upper-bound conjecture – since then it has been known as the upper bound theorem. McMullen's proof is amazingly simple and elegant, combining to key tools: shellability and h-vectors.
5. Gruber, Peter M. (2007), Convex and discrete geometry, Grundlehren der Mathematischen Wissenschaften [Fundamental Principles of Mathematical Sciences], 336, Berlin: Springer, p. 265, ISBN 978-3-540-71132-2, MR 2335496, The problem of characterizing the f-vectors of onvex polytopes is ... far from a solution, but there are important contributions towards it. For simplicial convex polytopes a characterization was proposed by McMullen in the form of his celebrated g-conjecture. The g-conjecture was proved by Billera and Lee and Stanley.
6. ICM 1974 proceedings.
7. Awards, Appointments, Elections & Honours, University College London, June 2006, retrieved 2013-11-03.
8. List of AMS fellows, retrieved 2013-11-03.