Description
Book SynopsisThe fascinating true story of mathematician Maria Agnesi. She is best known for her curve, the witch of Agnesi, which appears in almost all high school and undergraduate math books. She was a child prodigy who frequented the salon circuit, discussing mathematics, philosophy, history, and music in multiple languages. She wrote one of the first vernacular textbooks on calculus and was appointed chair of mathematics at the university in Bologna. In later years, however, she became a prominent figure within the Catholic Enlightenment, gave up academics, and devoted herself to the poor, the sick, the hungry, and the homeless. Indeed, the life of Maria Agnesi reveals a complex and enigmatic figureone of the most fascinating characters in the history of mathematics. Using newly discovered archival documents, Massimo Mazzotti reconstructs the wide spectrum of Agnesi's social experience and examines her relationships to various traditionsreligious, political, social, and mathematical. This me
Trade ReviewMazzotti's text is many things: well written, historically detailed, and descriptive. What stands out is his depiction of Maria Gaetana Agnesi as humble, kind, and mathematically talented.
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ConvergenceA welcome contribution to both an understanding of Maria Agnesi and life in the 1700s.
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ChoiceA nuanced and well-documented historical narrative that restores to us a key personage in eighteenth-century science and spirituality, combining cultural and political history with the history of the family.
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Catholic Historical ReviewMazzotti's book succeeds admirably in pushing beyond this summary judgment—the same that judges her curve 'insignificant'—to find in Agnesi's approach to mathematics a way to open a whole world of eighteenthcentury life and thought that supported her choices.
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IsisMazzotti’s account of the rise and fall of a relatively non-gendered intellectual environment in the early eighteenth century thus sheds light on a rare instance in which the Catholic Church actually advocated women’s equality. The strangeness of that phenomenon alone renders his work an interesting addition to the history of science.
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British Journal for the History of ScienceThis book is both a life and a times; it will have many readers.
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American Historical ReviewMazzotti's treatment of her is by far the most sophisticated biography that we have of this fascinating woman . . . His book is a cultural history of mathematics at its best.
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Historia MathematicaThe overall result is micro-history at its best, and a history of mathematics that is narrated, as it always should be, through the broader history of the people and places that made this particular science what it is.
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The Mathematical IntelligencerTable of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction
1. Engaging in a Conversation
2. Catholicisms
3. Trees of Knowledge
4. Choices
5. A List of Books
6. Calculus for the Believer
7. A New Female Mind
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index
