Background
Alicia Boole was born in Cork, Ireland, the third daughter of mathematician and logician George Boole and Mary Everest Boole, a self-taught mathematician and educationalist. After her father"s sudden death in 1864 the family moved to London where her mother became the librarian at Queen"s College, London.
Education
She attended the school attached to Queens" College with her sister, but never attended university.
Career
Despite never holding an academic position, she made a number of valuable contributions to the field She is best known for coining the term "polytope" for a convex solid in four (or more) dimensions, and having an impressive grasp of four-dimensional geometry from a very early age. Lucy Everest Boole was a chemist and pharmacist and Ethel Lilian Voynich was a novelist.
Alicia was the only Boole sister to inherit her father"s mathematical talent.
She found that there were exactly six regular polytopes in four dimensions and that they are bounded by 5, 16 or 600 tetrahedra, 8 cubes, 24 octahedra or 120 dodecahedra. (Though this was already known to Schläfli) She then produced three-dimensional central cross-sections of all the six regular polytopes by purely Euclidean constructions and synthetic methods for the simple reason that she had never learned any analytic geometry.
She made cardboard models of all these sections. She coined the term "polytopes" to describe them.
They had two children together, Mary (1891-1982) and Leonard (1892-1963).
Stott learned of Pieter Schoute"s work on central sections of the regular polytopes in 1895. Schoute came to England and worked with Alicia Stott, persuading her to publish her results which she did in two papers published in Amsterdam in 1900 and 1910. After Schoute"s death in 1923 Alicia took a hiatus from mathematical work.
The University of Groningen honoured her by inviting her to attend the tercentenary celebrations of the university and awarding her an honorary doctorate in 1914.
Alicia made two further important discoveries relating to constructions for polyhedra related to the golden section. She presented a joint paper with Coxeter at Cambridge University.
Coxeter later wrote, "The strength and simplicity of her character combined with the diversity of her interests to make her an inspiring friend."
Alicia died in Middlesex in 1940. In Spring 2001 a paper roll of coloured drawings of polyhedra was found at Groningen University.
Though unsigned, it was immediately recognised as Alicia"s work.
lieutenant led to research by Irene Polo-Blanco. Polo-Blanco dedicated a chapter to Alicia"s work in her book Theory and History of Mathematical Models (2007). Alicia"s son Leonard became a pioneer in the treatment of tuberculosis and invented an artificial pneumothorax apparatus.