Alicia Stott
mathematician
Dates: June 8, 1860 - December 17, 1940Occupation: mathematician
Also known as: Alicia Boole
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-dimensional 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.
Also on this site
Alicia Stott on the web
- Alicia Boole Stott - a short biography of Stott
- Alicia Boole Stott - profile of Stott, a radio transcript from the series "Engines of Our Ingenuity"
- References for Stott - a brief bibliography
- George Boole - Alicia Boole Stott's father
About Alicia Stott
- Categories: mathematician
- Places: Cork, Ireland, London, England
- Period: 19th century, 20th century
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Text © 1999-2009 Jone Johnson Lewis.
