William A. Veech was the Edgar O. Lovett Professor of Mathematics at Rice University[1] until his death.
His research concerned dynamical systems; he is particularly known for his work on interval exchange transformations, and is the namesake of the Veech surface.
[2] Veech graduated from Dartmouth College in 1960,[1] and earned his Ph.D. in 1963 from Princeton University under the supervision of Salomon Bochner.
[6] Veech played a role in the Nobel-prize-winning discovery of buckminsterfullerene in 1985 by a team of Rice University chemists including Richard Smalley.
At that time, Veech was chair of the Rice mathematics department, and was asked by Smalley to identify the shape that the chemists had determined for this molecule.