Alicia Boole Stott

Alicia Boole Stott (born Alicia Boole; born June 8, 1860 in Cork , Ireland , † December 17, 1940 in England ) was a British mathematician.

Alicia Boole was born the third daughter of mathematician George Boole , who died when she was four years old. She then grew up with her maternal grandmother and great-uncle in Cork. When she was 12 she came to live with her mother and four sisters in London, where they lived in poor conditions. From 1886 she worked at Liverpool as a secretary. In 1890 she married the insurance clerk Walter Stott, with whom she had two children.

Stott had no formal education in mathematics. But she learned from her mother, the school teacher Mary Everest Boole (1832–1916), niece of George Everest , the surveyor of India after whom Mount Everest is named, and had a remarkable spatial imagination from an early age. When she "played" with a wooden construction set at the age of 18, she discovered all 6 regular polytopes , a word that she introduced, in four dimensions, consisting of 5, 16 or 600 tetrahedra, 8 cubes, 24 octahedra or 120 dodecahedra as " Side surfaces "are limited. She also constructed geometrical - analytical geometry she had not learned - their projections in three dimensions and made models of these projections from maps. In 1895 she came into contact with the Dutch mathematician Pieter Schoute from the University of Groningen , who also worked on polyhedra, visited her and convinced her to publish her results. In 1900 and 1910 she published six works in Amsterdam, some with Schoute. In a work from 1910 she was the first to list all 45 semi-regular polytopes. One year after Schoute's death, she received an honorary doctorate from the University of Groningen at the university's 300th anniversary in 1914 , which also exhibited her geometric models. After that she didn't seem to have worked in mathematics until she worked again with HSM Coxeter from 1930 until her death , who was initially still a student at Cambridge.

She is the aunt of the hydrodynamicist Geoffrey Ingram Taylor .

literature

HSMCoxeter Regular Polytopes , Dover 1973, p. 258 (biography)
Coxeter, biography of Stott, reprinted in Louise Grinstein, Paul J. Campbell (editors) Women of Mathematics: A Biographical Sourcebook , Greenwood Press, Westport CT 1987.
Desmond MacHale: George Boole: His Life and Work , Boole Press, Dublin 1985.
Irene Polo-Blanco Alicia Boole Stott - a geometer in higher dimensions , Historia Mathematica, Vol. 35, No. 2, 2008, pp. 123-139 (based on her dissertation in Groningen 2007, Theory and History of Geometric Models )
Irene Polo-Blanco, Jon Gonzalez-Sanchez Four dimensional polytopes: Alicia Boole Stott's algorithm , Mathematical Intelligencer 2010, No. 3

Web links

Alicia Boole Stott . Biographies of Women Mathematicians, Agnes Scott College
John J. O'Connor, Edmund F. Robertson : Alicia Boole Stott. In: MacTutor History of Mathematics archive .
Tony Phillips: The Princess of Polytopia- Alicia Bool Scott and the 120 cell .
Models by Boole Stott in Groningen
Biography of her mother, Mary Everest Boole

References

↑ She got this from a family friend, Howard Hinton, who himself speculated as an amateur about higher dimensional spaces. Her mother was the secretary of James Hinton, Howard Hinton's father, at the time. James Hinton was a friend of Mary Everest Boole's father.
↑ They spent many summers, says Coxeter, at their cousin's summer home in Kent.
↑ Your work on projections of the four-dimensional polytopes is treated in the essay by Alicia Boole Stott: On certain Series of Sections of the Regular Four-dimensional Hypersolids. (Negotiations of the Koninklijke Akademie van Wetenschappen te Amsterdam, Section 1, Part VII, No. 3.) Müller, Amsterdam, 1900.
↑ Alicia Boole Stott: Geometrical deduction of semiregular from regular polytopes and space fillings. (Negotiations of the Koninklijke Akademie van Wetenschappen, 1st section, part 11, no. 1). Müller, Amsterdam, 1910, pp. 3-24.
↑ He published memories of them in his "Scientific Diversions" in SW Higginbotham (Ed.): Man, Science, Learning and Education (= Rice University Studies, Vol. 69, Supplement 2). 1963.

personal data
SURNAME	Stott, Alicia Boole
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Boole, Alicia (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	British mathematician
DATE OF BIRTH	June 8, 1860
PLACE OF BIRTH	Cork
DATE OF DEATH	17th December 1940
Place of death	England

[1] She got this from a family friend, Howard Hinton, who himself speculated as an amateur about higher dimensional spaces. Her mother was the secretary of James Hinton, Howard Hinton's father, at the time. James Hinton was a friend of Mary Everest Boole's father.

[2] They spent many summers, says Coxeter, at their cousin's summer home in Kent.

[3] Your work on projections of the four-dimensional polytopes is treated in the essay by Alicia Boole Stott: On certain Series of Sections of the Regular Four-dimensional Hypersolids. (Negotiations of the Koninklijke Akademie van Wetenschappen te Amsterdam, Section 1, Part VII, No. 3.) Müller, Amsterdam, 1900.

[4] Alicia Boole Stott: Geometrical deduction of semiregular from regular polytopes and space fillings. (Negotiations of the Koninklijke Akademie van Wetenschappen, 1st section, part 11, no. 1). Müller, Amsterdam, 1910, pp. 3-24.

[5] He published memories of them in his "Scientific Diversions" in SW Higginbotham (Ed.): Man, Science, Learning and Education (= Rice University Studies, Vol. 69, Supplement 2). 1963.