The James Logan Courier

By Tish Wells
McClatchy Newspapers (MCT)

Even before the first "Pirates of the Caribbean" movie, pirates were romantic.
Now, in "The Captain Jack Sparrow Handbook" Jason Heller brings you a guide to all things (Disney) pirate.

Piracy has been with us from the beginning of time. Julius Caesar was taken prisoner, ransomed and later crucified his capturers. The infamous Blackbeard looted ships in the eighteenth century. There was little attractive about pirates.

However, don't let historical fact get in the way of the "Handbook."

From wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

Alicia Boole Stott (June 8, 1860 - December 17, 1940) was the third daughter of George Boole, born in Cork, Ireland. Before marrying Walter Stott, an actuary, in 1890, she was known as Alicia Boole. She is most well known for coining the term "polytope" to refer to a convex solid in four dimensions, and having an impressive grasp of four-dimensional geometry from a very early age.

She found that there were exactly six regular polytopes on four dimensions and that they are bounded by 5, 16 or 600 tetrahedra, 8 cubes, 24 octahedra or 120 dodecahedra. She then produced three-dimensional central cross-sections of all the six regular polytopes by purely Euclidean constructions and synthetic methods for the simple reason that she had never learned any analytic geometry. She made beautiful cardboard models of all these sections.

Read The Princess of Polytopia: Alicia Boole Stott and the 120-cell, by Tony Phillips of Stony Brook University, free from the American Mathematical Society,