[HM] J.F.Petrie

Peter Schreiber (schreibe@mail.uni-greifswald.de)
Thu, 19 Aug 1999 16:40:45 METDST

Please, help me with biographical informations on John Flinders Petrie
(1907-1972), the son of a well-known egyptologist. Was he a professional
mathematician or else an amateur? P. Cromwell writes in his nice book
"Polyhedra" (Cambridge University Press 1997) that J. F. Petrie found
in 1926 two of the three unbounded regular polyhedral shapes and com-
municated it to his friend, the well-known geometer H. S. M. Coxeter.
Coxeter then found the third one and published this, but seemingly
Petrie never did publish his discovery.

Peter Schreiber