The McMullen problem is an unsolved question in discrete geometry named after McMullen, concerning the number of points in general position for which a projective transformation into convex position can be guaranteed to exist. It was credited to a private communication from McMullen in a 1972 paper by David G. Larman.[8]
He is also known for his 1960s drawing, by hand, of a 2-dimensional representation of the Gosset polytope 421, the vertices of which form the vectors of the E8 root system.[9]
——; Schneider, Rolf (1983), "Valuations on convex bodies", Convexity and its applications, Basel: Birkhäuser, pp. 170–247, MR0731112. Updated as "Valuations and dissections" (by McMullen alone) in Handbook of convex geometry (1993), MR1243000.
Books
——; Shephard, Geoffrey C. (1971), Convex Polytopes and the Upper Bound Conjecture, Cambridge University Press.
^Ziegler, Günter M. (1995), Lectures on Polytopes, Graduate Texts in Mathematics, vol. 152, Springer, p. 254, ISBN9780387943657, Finally, in 1970 McMullen gave a complete proof of the upper-bound conjecture – since then it has been known as the upper bound theorem. McMullen's proof is amazingly simple and elegant, combining to key tools: shellability and h-vectors.
^Gruber, Peter M. (2007), Convex and discrete geometry, Grundlehren der Mathematischen Wissenschaften [Fundamental Principles of Mathematical Sciences], vol. 336, Berlin: Springer, p. 265, ISBN978-3-540-71132-2, MR2335496, The problem of characterizing the f-vectors of convex polytopes is ... far from a solution, but there are important contributions towards it. For simplicial convex polytopes a characterization was proposed by McMullen in the form of his celebrated g-conjecture. The g-conjecture was proved by Billera and Lee and Stanley.
^Larman, D. G. (1972), "On sets projectively equivalent to the vertices of a convex polytope", The Bulletin of the London Mathematical Society, 4: 6–12, doi:10.1112/blms/4.1.6, MR0307040