Alicia Boole Stott

Alicia Boole Stott

June 8, 1860 - December 17, 1940

The third of the five daughters of Mary Everest Boole. Despite having no formal education in mathematics, she still possessed a great power of geometric visualization in hyperspace. From the age of seventeen until her death, she remained interested in regular and semi-regular four-dimensional polytopes and made several important discoveries in this area. For example, she showed that there were 6 regular polyhedra in 4-dimensional space and made physical models related to her work. She collaborated with Professor Peiter Schoute of the University of Groningen and he also helped to publish some of her own work. According to H.S.M. Coxeter [2], "Mrs. Stott's power of geometrical visualization supplemented Schoute's more orthodox methods, so they were an ideal team." After Schoute's death in 1913, the University of Groningen conferred upon her an honorary degree and exhibited her geometric models. In 1930 Stott began a collaboration with Coxeter in the investigation of a special kind of four-dimensional polytope for which she made models of its sections.

You can read about Alicia Boole Stott and her work on regular four-dimensional hypersolids in a feature article by Tony Phillips, Stony Brook University, that is part of the AMS monthly essays on mathematical topics.

Listen to a story about Alicia Boole Stott from the show "Engines of Our Ingenuity" hosted by John H. Lienhard, M.D. Anderson Professor Emeritus of Mechanical Engineering and History at the University of Houston (transcript also available).

References

  1. Coxeter, H.S.M. "Alicia Boole Stott," in Women of Mathematics: A Biobibliographic Sourcebook, Louise Grinstein and Paul Campbell, Editors, Greenwood Press, 1987.
  2. Coxeter, H.S.M. Regular Polytopes, Methuen & Co., London, 1948, 258-259.
  3. Grosslein, Louise Roslansky. "Alicia Boole Stott," in Notable Women in Mathematics: A Biographical Dictionary, Charlene Morrow and Teri Perl, Editors, Greenwood Press (1998), 242-246.
  4. Desmond MacHale. George Boole: His Life and Work, Boole Press, 1985.
  5. Polo-Blanco, Irene. "Alicia Boole Stott, a geometer in higher dimensions," Historia Mathematica, Vol. 35, No. 2 (May 2008), 123-139.
  6. Biography at the MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive

Photo Credit: The photo of Alicia Boole Stott is from the book George Boole by Desmond MacHale and is used with permission of the publisher, Boole Press, 26 Temple Lane, Dublin 2, Ireland (Tel. +353-1-6797655, Fax +353-1-6792469, Email 73173.1245@compuserve.com).