Lucy Everest Boole (5 August 1862 – 5 December 1904) daughter of Mary Everest Boole and George Boole, granddaughter of Thomas Roupell Everest.

Lucy Everest Boole a chemist, was the fourth daughter of the mathematician George Boole and was born in Blackrock, in Cork. She was a chemist and was the second woman to pass the London School of Pharmacy‘s major examination in 1888 and was the first woman to formally do research in pharmaceutical chemistry.

She was assistant to the chemist Wyndham Rowland Dunstan (1861-1924), Professor of Chemistry to the Pharmaceutical Society. Her method of analysis of tartar emetic was the official method of assay until 1963.

Lucy Boole lectured at the London School of Medicine for Women, and was the first woman Professor of Chemistry at The Royal Free Hospital in London. She was a Fellow of the Institute of Chemistry. Lucy Boole never married and lived with her mother Mary Everest Boole until her death in 1904.

Lucy’s promising career was cut short by her premature death at the age of forty-three.

Lucy Boole assisted her nephew Geoffrey Ingram Taylor in his work, and she collaborated with Sir Wyndham Rowland Dunstan. Geoffrey Ingram Taylor reported how much influence his home life had, meaning “much more to me than anything I did at school,” and that Lucy and her four sisters Mary, Margaret, Alicia and Ethel were often in attendance, as was their mother Mary Everest Boole (George Boole had died when the children were quite young), who “all contributed to the family influences.”

Lucy and her sisters were all home educated by Mary Everest Boole in mathematics and geometry, logic and thinking for themselves.

Lucy was also taught by Sergyei “Stepniak” Kravchinsky:

Lucy studied with her (Ethel) and both women regarded Stepniak as their guardian.

In 1895 Lucy wrote An Enquiry Into the Nature of the Vesicating Constituent of Croton Oil with Wyndham Rowland Dunstan.

Of Interest:

Lucy Everest Boole had four sisters:

  • Mary Ellen (7 June 1856 – 28 May 1908), who married the mathematician and author Charles Howard Hinton (1853 – 1907). They had three children, Howard, William and Joan.
  • Margaret (1858 – 16 August 1935), whose son Geoffrey Ingram Taylor became a mathematician and a Fellow of the Royal Society
  • Alicia (8 June 1860 – 17 December 1940), also a mathematician, who made important contributions to four-dimensional geometry
  • Ethel Lilian (11 May 1864 – 27 July 1960), who married the Polish scientist and revolutionary Wilfrid Michael Voynich and was the author of the novel The Gadfly.