Coxeter:
He did, and became quite clever at it. Unfortunately, because his father
belonged to University College London, and my teacher wanted me to go to
Cambridge, we went to different universities. He did quite well at
University College and then the War came, W.W.II; he enlisted as an officer
and was taken prisoner by the Germans. He organized a choir there. After
the War ended and he was released, he went to a well-known school in
southwest England, Dartington Hall, and he had a rather trivial job there.
He never seemed to fulfill his early promise. He just became a tutor who
looked after children who were not doing well in school.
But he still corresponded with me, and it was he who noticed that when
you take a regular polyhedron and look at the edges, you see that there is a
zigzag of edges that go round and close up; for instance, if you take those
edges of a cube that do not involve one pair of opposite vertices, the form
a skew hexagon. We call this the "Petrie polygon," and it is now a well
known property of a regular polyhedron to have a Petrie polygon: a skew
polygon in which every two consecutive edges, but no three, belong to a
face.
I.H:
Is he retired now?
H.S.M.C:
No, he died. A very sad story. He married a very lovely lady and had a
daughter and all went well. Then somehow his wife got a heart attack and
died. He was so distraught, missed her so terribly that he didn't know
where he was going, and he walked into a motorway in England where the cars
were going at a huge speed and he just didn't know what was happening and
one of them killed him, just two weeks after his wife died. This was about
24 years ago.
Michael N. Fried