Daniel Pedoe - Cambridge, Princeton and Hodge

Cambridge, Princeton and Hodge

During his first three years at Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he was a scholar, he was tutored in mathematics by Frank P. Ramsey. In 1935 he took a break from Cambridge and went to Princeton University where he was made a member of the Institute for Advanced Study and worked with Lefschetz. His PhD was based on H. F. Baker's work on the Italian theory of algebraic surfaces. Hodge and Baker were his PhD examiners at Cambridge.

In 1941 a collaboration with Hodge started which lasted some twelve years and included the writing of the huge three-volume work, Method of Algebraic Geometry. Although the book was originally designed as a geometric counterpart of G. H. Hardy's A Course of Pure Mathematics it was never intended as a textbook and contains original material. First published in the 1940s, all three volumes were reprinted by Cambridge University Press in 1995.