Aunt Alice in Wonderland

Abstract

George and Mary Everest Boole’s daughter Alicia learnt Hinton’s methods for visualizing hypercubes during her teens and developed an incredible facility for four-dimensional geometry. As a housewife and without any formal training in mathematics she discovered all six regular four-dimensional polytopes (the four-dimensional Platonic solids) and made models of their three-dimensional sections. The regular polytopes had previously been discovered by Ludwig Schläfli and William Irving Stringham, but their work had received little attention and was probably unknown to Alicia Stott Boole. Alicia later worked for a time with the Dutch mathematician Pieter Hendrik Schoute. When she was in her 70s, her nephew, later Professor Geoffrey Ingram Taylor, introduced her to a young Cambridge student called Donald Coxeter. Coxeter developed her ideas further, and in 1948 published the first edition of his book Regular Polytopes. Coxeter is now recognized as the greatest classical geometer of the twentieth century.