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STEM Heroines: Math role models for girls

Here's our list of female mathematicians through history who broke down barriers in their own lives to learn and live as experts in their field.  

6. Alicia Stott (1860 – 1940)

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff
A second grader works on her math worksheets at Leviton Dual Language Elementary School in Providence, Rhode Island, on November 4, 2013.

  • By Staff Correspondent

Alicia Stott was an English mathematician who translated Platonic and Archimedean solids into higher dimensions, according to the Association for Women in Mathematics. She was first trained in mathematics by her mother, and was inspired by amateur mathematician Charles Hinton, who was a school teacher interested in four-dimensional geometry, the field of mathematics that Ms. Stott started studying when she was a teen.

Stott was married with two children when her husband, Walter Stott, an actuary, promoted her math skills to mathematician Pieter Hendrik Schoute at the University of Groningen in The Netherlands. Once Mr. Schoute saw photographs of some models that Alicia Stott had built, he moved to England to work with her.

Between 1900 and 1910, they published six papers together. The University of Groningen conferred upon Alicia Stott an honorary degree and exhibited her geometric models after Schoute's death in 1913.

In 1930, she began a new collaboration with H.S.M. Coxeter, who was at that time a graduate student at Cambridge University. They investigated a special kind four-dimensional polytope – a geometric object with flat sides, existent in multiple dimensions – and Stott modeled its sections. She continued to work until her death in 1940.

geometric object with flat sides, which exists in any general number of dimensions

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

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