Wendy Krieger

Wendy Krieger was born on 23 July 1957. She has a degree in Applied Physics, but a strong interest in number systems, weights and measures, and older languages.

The interest in higher dimensions began with trying to reconsile Minkowski and Euclidean geometries. Visits to the campus library lead to discoveries of Wenninger's and later Coxeter's books. Being too poor to afford photocopies, she wrote out, and corrected, various lists of the latter's "Regular Polytopes". These seem to be the books of the matter, but there was nothing in there about what she had found by this point in time.

Café mathematics was born of the stolen moments in the back of the refectary, or on the bus. It involves little more than a four-function calculator (perhaps), and some paper. Much of this stolen minutes went into inventing the necessary rationalised mathematics that would eventually provide profound insights into the higher dimensions. Calculations by hand were greatly simplified by using the six-score hundred.

The years of work provided sufficient money to fritter on books that might help in different activities. Regular Polytopes, and Regular Complex Polytopes were among the books she picked up in Sydney. They are as still unreadable as the 1946 version from the Library,

Invalidity, retirement, and her mother's increasing dementia slowed things down a little, but a series of random deaths in the family lessened the need to run a home hospice. Most of the dead had made 90, and had diminished much in health. Es muß sein.

The internet opened a new venue for her þ revival project, where polytope rambiligs would provide the background text. She soon came to understand that it was at least as good as anyone else was doing, and soon started participating in various forums on computers, bases, and polytopes. os2fan2 was the monicker she used as a name on the internet, simply because she was an "OS/2 fan, too".

The mail list gave way to the forums, of which she still moderate five or so. She was a prolific poster in many of these, an Mangus Wenninger noted, it's not the number of posts, it's the quality of them.

The latest effort is the "discord" where she posts random polytope stuff, without actually inventing polytopes. The notation she wrote as a program input tool in the 1980s has been strong enough to weather the various extensions on the behest of the likes of Richard Klitzing.