W. V. D. Hodge

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articlesavailable from Wikipedia or other free sources online. William VallanceDouglas Hodge FRS (17 June 1903 - 7 July 1975) was a Scottishmathematician, specifically a geometer. His discovery of far-reachingtopological relations between algebraic geometry and differentialgeometry - an area now called Hodge theory and pertaining more generallyto Kähler manifolds - has been a major influence on subsequent work ingeometry. He was born in Edinburgh, attended George Watson's Collegeand studied at Edinburgh University, graduating in 1923. With help fromE. T. Whittaker whose son J. M. Whittaker was a college friend, he thentook the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos. At Cambridge he fell under theinfluence of the geometer H. F. Baker. In 1926 he took up a teachingposition at the University of Bristol, and began work on the interfacebetween the Italian school of algebraic geometry, particularly problemsposed by Francesco Severi, and the topological methods of SolomonLefschetz.