Alicia Boole Stott’s models of sections of polytopes

Abstract

Alicia Boole Stott (1860–1940) was an amateur mathematician who worked on four-dimensional geometry. She is remembered for finding all three dimensional sections of the four- dimensional polytopes (that is, the analogues of the three-dimensional Platonic solids), and for the discovery of many of the semi-regular polytopes. In this text we give a short biography of her and explain her method to calculate the three-dimensional sections of the four-dimensional polytopes. We illustrate her results by showing pictures of her original models and drawings.