Alicia Boole Stott

Alicia Boole Stott (8 June 1860 – 17 December 1940) was a British mathematician. She made a number of contributions to the field and was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Groningen. She grasped four-dimensional geometry from an early age, and introduced the term "polytope" for a convex solid in four or more dimensions.

Alicia Boole was born in Cork, Ireland, the third of five daughters of English parents: the mathematician and logician George Boole and Mary Everest Boole, a self-taught mathematician and educationalist. Of her sisters, Lucy Everest Boole was a chemist and pharmacist and Ethel Lilian Voynich was a novelist.

Alicia's father died from a fever in 1864, when Alicia was four. Facing poverty, Alicia's mother moved the family to London, where Mary became the librarian at Queen's College, London. Alicia, unlike her sisters, remained in Cork and stayed with her grandmother and great uncle. When Alicia was 11 she rejoined her mother and sisters in London.

Mary researched mathematics and educational methods aside from her work as a teacher, and she later wrote about the use of geometric models for early childhood mathematical education. Irene Polo-Blanco suggests it is likely that Mary used these methods in teaching math to her daughters. At the time, formal mathematical education was not available or encouraged for most women, and Alicia mostly learned from her mother and the first two books of Euclid.

Alicia attended the school attached to Queens' College with one of her sisters, but never attended university.

Stott was the only Boole sister to inherit the mathematical career of her parents, although her mother Mary Everest Boole had brought up all of her five children from an early age "to acquaint them with the flow of geometry" by projecting shapes onto paper, hanging pendulums etc.

Stott was first exposed to geometric models of higher-dimensional spaces by her brother-in-law Charles Howard Hinton when she was 17, and she developed the ability to visualise four-dimensional space. Hinton had crafted 4D models with wooden cubes and shared these with the Boole sisters. Eventually, Stott grew better than Hinton at understanding higher-dimensional geometry. Hinton's cubes later became a popular and notoriously difficult method of attempting to understand 4D geometry. Stott was one of the only people known to have mastered the technique.

Stott found that there are exactly six regular convex 4-polytopes. That discovery had been made by Ludwig Schläfli before 1850 but his work had not yet been published. She introduced the term polytope because she did not know Schläfli's term polyscheme. She produced three-dimensional central cross-sections of all the six regular polytopes in four dimensions by purely Euclidean constructions and synthetic methods since she had never learned any analytic geometry. She made cardboard models of all these sections.