Alicia Boole Stott, a geometer in higher dimension (Q2426751): Difference between revisions

Alicia was born in 1860, in Ireland. Her father was a logician and her mother, although having little educational opportunities, as actually all women of those times, had studied mathematics with her husband (later on, she wrote numerous books approaching various aspects of pedagogy). After her father's early death, Alicia's first teacher was her mother. She was also much influenced by the ideas of the mathematician Ch. H. Hinton, who was to become her brother-in-law. He used to contemplate hundreds of small coloured cubes, which helped him with his ideas and with the vitualization of the surrounding reality in 4 dimensions, up to perceiving the hypercube. Another personality with whom Alicia collaborated her entire life was geometer Schoute, from Groningen. In the 19th century, the most important paper on 4-dimensional geometry was the Habilitation lecture of Riemann, who introduced here the notion of an \(n\)-dimensional manifold. The Swiss mathematician Schläfli discovered the 4-dimensional polytopes, on the basis of which he developed a theory of geometry in \(n\) dimensions.