A more detailed account of Boole Stott’s life can also be found in. His book Regular Polytopes also contains numerous facts about Boole Stott’s life, and together with is the main source of information about her biography. There are no joint publications, but the contributions of Boole Stott are known thanks to numerous references to them in the work of Coxeter. Although Coxeter was only 23 years old and Boole Stott 60, they developed a close friendship and worked together on various aspects of four-dimensional geometry. ![]() In 1930 she resumed her work when her nephew, the famous physicist and applied mathematician Geoffrey Ingram Taylor, introduced her to the geometer H. The work of Boole Stott culminated in an honorary doctorate being awarded to her by the University of Groningen in 1914, in recognition of her contribution to four-dimensional geometry.Īfter Schoute’s death, Boole Stott set her mathematical investigations aside to devote herself exclusively to domestic life. Their collaboration combined Boole Stott’s extraordinary capacity to visualise the fourth dimension with Schoute’s analytical method. During this period, Schoute travelled to England during the summer holidays and worked with Boole Stott on various topics regarding the fourth dimension. Quite surprised by Boole Stott’s results, Schoute replied to her immediately, proposing a collaboration that would last for almost 20 years, until Schoute’s death in 1913. Figure 3 shows that the central sections of Boole Stott and Schoute effectively match for the case of the 600-cell. After verifying that Schoute’s results coincided with her own, Boole Stott sent pictures of models illustrating not only the central section of each polytope calculated by Schoute, but the entire series. According to Coxeter Boole Stott learned about this publication from her husband. In 1894 the Dutch geometer Pieter Hendrik Schoute published an article in which he calculated analytically the central sections of the six regular four-dimensional polytopes. In addition to proving the existence of these polytopes, Boole Stott calculated their three-dimensional sections and constructed models of them in coloured cardboard. The six regular four-dimensional polytopes are the hypercube, hypertetrahedron, hyperoctahedron, 24-cell, 120-cell and 600-cell. These polytopes were first listed by Ludwig Schläfli in 1850 (published after his death in 1901 in ), and are four-dimensional analogues of the three-dimensional Platonic solids. At that time, Boole Stott worked completely independently, without any contact with the scientific world, and proved the existence of the six regular four-dimensional polytopes. Inspired by Howard Hinton, Alicia Boole Stott began investigating four-dimensional polytopes in her free time as the children grew. In 1890 Alicia married the actuary Walter Stott, with whom she had two children, Mary and Leonard. Alicia contributed to writing part of the book. ![]() This greatly inspired Alice in her future work, and she soon began surprise Hinton with her ability to visualize the fourth dimension. During his visits to the Boole family, Hinton used to pile up groups of wooden blocks to try to allow the five daughters to visualize the four-dimensional hypercube. He became famous with his book The Fourth Dimension, in which the subject is treated from a philosophical point of view. Hinton was a mathematics teacher, and enormously interested in the fourth dimension. During the years she lived in London, Mary Everest Boole received numerous visitors at home, among whom was the amateur mathematician Howard Hinton. She wrote several books on mathematics learning, and believed strongly in the importance of early stimulation of children for an effective learning of geometry and other aspects of mathematics. Mary Everest Boole was known in her day for her peculiar ideas about education. How was it then possible for her to obtain such surprising mathematical results during her life? One of the reasons is undoubtedly due to the unique atmosphere in which she grew up and the special education she received from her mother. Alicia’s formal scientific knowledge consisted of only the first two books of Euclid. It should be noted that the English universities of the time did not offer degrees to women, who could only aspire to study some of the classics of literature and other arts.
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