Peter McMullen


Peter McMullen is a British mathematician, a professor emeritus of mathematics at University College London.

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.

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. McMullen also formulated the g-conjecture, later the g-theorem of Louis Billera, Carl W. Lee, and Richard P. Stanley, characterizing the f-vectors of simplicial spheres.

Awards and honours

McMullen was invited to speak at the 1974 International Congress of Mathematicians in Vancouver; his contribution there had the title Metrical and combinatorial properties of convex polytopes.
He was elected as a foreign member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in 2006. In 2012 he became an inaugural fellow of the American Mathematical Society.

Selected publications

;Research papers
;Survey articles
;Books