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Alicia Boole Stott
(June 8, 1860 - December 17, 1940)
Alicia Boole Stott's
father was the mathematician George Boole (for whom Boolean
logic is named). He was teaching in Ireland when Alicia was born
there, in 1860, and he died four years later. Alicia lived with
her grandmother in England and her great-uncle in Cork for the
next ten years before she rejoined her mother and sisters in
London.
In her teens, Alicia Stott became interested in four-dimensional
hypercubes, or tesseracts. She became secretary to John Falk, an
associate of her brother-in-law, Howard Hinton, who had
introduced her to tesseracts. Alicia Stott continued building
models of wood to represent four-dimensional convex solids,
which she named polytopes, and published an article on three-dimenstional
sections of hypersolids in 1900.
She married Walter Stott, an actuary. They had two children, and
Alicia Stott settled into the role of homemaker until her
husband noted that her mathematical interests might also be of
interest to the mathematician Pieter Hendrik Schoute at the
University of Groningen. After the Stotts wrote to Schoute, and
Schoute saw photographs of some models that Alicia Stott had
built, Schoute moved to England to work with her.
Alicia Stott worked on deriving Archimedean solids from Platonic
solids. With Schoute's encouragement, she published papers on
her own and that the two of them developed together.
In 1914, Schoute's colleagues at Groningen invited Alicia Stott
to a celebration, planning to award to her an honorary degree.
But when Schoute died before the ceremony could be held, Alicia
Stott returned to the her middle class life at home.
In 1930, Alicia Stott began collaborating with H. S. M. Coxeter
on the geometry of kaleidoscopes. She also constructed cardboard
models of the "snub 24-cell."
She died in 1940.
References for Alicia Boole Stott
Books:
- H S M Coxeter, Regular
polytopes (London, 1948).
Articles:
- L S Grinstein and P J
Campbell (eds.), Women of Mathematics (Westport, Conn.,
1987), 220-224.
- D McHale, George Boole :
his life and work (Dublin, 1985), 260-263.
http://womenshistory.about.com/library/bio/blbio_alicia_stott.htm |
