Pieter Hendrik Schoute

Pieter Hendrik Schoute came from a family of industrialists who had a business near Amsterdam. He studied at Polytechnic in Delft, graduating as a civil engineer in 1867.

After graduating, Schoute went to Leiden to undertake research in mathematics. His doctorate was awarded by Leiden in 1870 for a dissertation Homography applied to the theory of quadric surfaces. After being awarded his doctorate, Schoute taught mathematics in a secondary school in Nijmegen from 1871 until 1874 when he moved to The Hague and again taught mathematics in a secondary school there until 1881. From 1881 until his death he was professor of mathematics at the University of Groningen.

Johann Bernoulli was professor of mathematics at Groningen from 1695 until 1705 when he left the University disillusioned. Sierksma in [3] explains that after Bernoulli left Groningen there were a number of professors of mathematics who were to some extent involved in mathematics but none of them was really interested in it. The situation changed markedly for the better with the appointment of Schoute in 1881 and from that time the fortunes of mathematics at Groningen improved greatly. In particular there was the second excellent appointment of Floris de Boer as professor of mathematics to Groningen to join Schoute three years after he was appointed.

Schoute studied various topics in geometry such as quadrics and algebraic curves. Struik writes in [1]:-

Schoute was a typical geometer. In his early work he investigated quadrics, algebraic curves, complexes, and congruences in the spirit of nineteenth-century projective, metrical, and enumerative geometry.

From 1891 Schoute studied Euclidean geometry of more than 3 dimensions, writing 28 papers, some jointly with Alica Boole Stott the daughter of George Boole. It was research on regular polytopes, which generalise the concept of regular polyhedra, that led to his collaboration with Stott.

The article [3] is published in the journal Nieuw Archief Wiskunde. Schoute was an editor of this journal from 1898 until his death in 1923. He was also a founding editor of Revue semestrielle des publications mathématique from 1893, when the journal was founded, again until his death in 1923.

Schoute was elected to the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences in 1886.

Texto original por: J J O'Connor and E F Robertson

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JOC/EFR May 2000	School of Mathematics and Statistics University of St Andrews, Scotland
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