Boole, Alicia (1860–1940), amateur mathematician, was born 8 June 1860 in Cork into an intellectually gifted family, third of five daughters of English parents: Prof. George Boole (qv) of QCC, distinguished mathematician and logician, and Mary Boole (née Everest; 1832–1916), author and pioneer in modern pedagogy. Ethel L. Voynich (qv), novelist, was her youngest sister. She was a grandniece of George Everest (1790–1866), surveyor general of India, whose name is commemorated by the mountain. The death of her father (1864) left the family impoverished, and her mother returned to England.
She remained in Cork and spent an unhappy childhood in the care of her maternal grandmother and her great-uncle, John Ryall (c.1806–75), first vice-president (1845–75) and professor of Greek at QCC. About 1871 she was reunited with her family in London, where their straitened circumstances were lightened by a lively bohemian social life. She was educated at the school attached to Queen's College, London – where her mother held several positions including librarian and mathematics teacher – but had no mathematical training beyond the first two books of Euclid; however, c.1888, under the stimulus of mathematician C. H. Hinton (1853–1907), her future brother-in-law, she experimented with wooden cubes and developed a clear grasp of four-dimensional geometry. Fascinated by the convex regular solids in four dimensions, she constructed on her own, by ruler and compass, cardboard models of the three-dimensional central-cross sections of all the six regular four-dimensional figures, introducing into English the term ‘polytope’ to describe them. At Hinton's request – due to his imminent departure from England – and jointly with H. J. Falk, she wrote the preface to, and completed, his treatise A new era of thought (1888).
While working as a secretary in Liverpool (1889), she married (1890) Walter Stott, actuary; they had a son and a daughter and Alicia gave up her mathematical hobby and devoted her energies exclusively to her family. Around 1900 her husband drew her attention to the work on central sections of the regular four-dimensional polytopes of Pieter H. Schoute (1846–1913), professor of mathematics at Groningen University, in the Netherlands. She sent him photographs of her models and he invited her to collaborate with him, a partnership that lasted till his death; her exceptional powers of geometrical visualisation complemented his more conventional analytical approach. He persuaded her to publish her work (using her married name), On certain series of sections of the regular four-dimensional hypersolids (Amsterdam, 1900) and Geometrical deduction of semi-regular from regular polytopes and space fillings (Amsterdam, 1910) and they published jointly On the sections of a block of eight cells by a space rotating about a plane (1908). After his death she was invited to the tercentenary celebrations of Groningen University, which conferred on her an honorary degree (1914) and exhibited her models.
In 1930 she resumed her work, collaborating with the distinguished mathematician H. S. M. Coxeter (1907-2003), FRS, having been introduced to him by her nephew G. I. Taylor (1886–1975), applied mathematician, FRS. According to Coxeter, ‘the strength and simplicity of her character combined with the diversity of her interests to make her an inspiring friend’ (Coxeter, 259). They investigated the four-dimensional polytope of Thorold Gosset (1869–1962); she introduced new methods, discovered a great variety of uniform polytopes, and made two further important discoveries relating to constructions for polyhedra related to the golden section. R. R. Ball, in Mathematical recreations and essays (1947) described her methods as ‘extraordinarily fruitful’ (McHale, 262). She died 17 December 1940 in a catholic nursing home. Her son, Leonard Boole Stott (1892–1963), OBE, was a pioneer in the treatment of tuberculosis and an inventor of great originality, devising a system of navigation based on spherical trigonometry, artificial pneumothorax apparatus, and a portable X-ray machine.
Her younger sister Lucy Everest Boole (1862–1905), chemist, was born 5 August 1862 in Cork. Educated at the school attached to Queen's College, London, she never attended university but studied chemistry to become a dispenser in a pharmacy. She was appointed demonstrator (1891) and lecturer in chemistry (1893–1904) at the London School of Medicine for Women, where she was appreciated as a dedicated teacher. She collaborated and published jointly with Sir W. R. Dunstan (1861–1949), FRS. Her research centred on croton oil and other substances, and she became the first woman to be elected fellow of the Institute of Chemistry (1894). Despite suffering ill-health for many years, she continued her work, which was her sole interest; she never married, and lived with her mother at 16 Ladbroke Rd, Notting Hill, London. She died in December 1905.