-a project in History of Mathematics

1. Roxanne Joie V. Dean
BSE IV Major in Mathematics
Batch 2012

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18th Century & Before
19 th Century

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Maria Gaetana
Theano
Agnesi
Hypatia Caroline Herschel
Elena Lucrezia Cornaro
Piscopia Sophie Germain
Mary Fairfax
Emilie du Chatelet
Somerville

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Theano was the wife of Pythagoras. She
and her two daughters carried on the
Pythagorean School after the death of
Pythagoras.
She wrote treatises on mathematics,
physics, medicine, and child psychology.
Her most important work was the principle
of the “Golden Mean.”

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Hypatia was the daughter of Theon, who
was considered one of the most educated
men in Alexandria, Egypt.
Hypatia was known more for the work she
did in mathematics than in astronomy,
primarily for her work on the ideas of
conic sections introduced by Apollonius.
Hypatia

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Hypatia was the first woman to have such
a profound impact on the survival of early
thought in mathematics.
She edited the work “On the Conics of
Apollonius”, which divided cones into
different parts by a plane. This concept
developed the ideas of hyperbolas,
parabolas, and ellipses.
Hypatia

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Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia was born
into a noble Venetian family on June 5,
1646 in Venice, Italy.
She was given the title “Oraculum
Septilingue” due to her command of
languages.
In Hypatia's Heritage, Margaret Alic states
that she became a mathematics lecturer
at the University of Padua in 1678.
Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia

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Born in Paris on December 17, 1706, she
grew up in a household where the art of
courting was the only way one could mold
a place in society.
Emilie's work in mathematics was rarely
original or as captivating as that of other
female mathematicians but it was
substantive.
Emilie du Chatelet

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Among her greatest achievements were
her “Institutions du physique” and the
translation of Newton's “Principia”, which
was published after her death along with a
“Preface historique” by Voltaire.
Emilie du Châtelet was one of many
women whose contributions have helped
shape the course of mathematics
Emilie du Chatelet

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Maria Gaetana Agnesi was born in Milan
on May 16, 1718, to a wealthy and literate
family.
In 1738 she published a collection of
complex essays on natural science and
philosophy called “Propositiones
Philosophicae”, based on the discussions
of the intellectuals who gathered at her
father's home.
Maria Gaetana Agnesi

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By the age of twenty, she began working
on her most important work, “Analytical
Institutions,” dealing with differential and
integral calculus.
It was one of the first and most complete
works on finite and infinitesimal analysis.
Maria's great contribution to mathematics
with this book was that it brought the
works of various mathematicians together
in a very systematic way with her own
interpretations.
Maria Gaetana Agnesi

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“Analytical Institutions” gave a clear
summary of the state of knowledge in
mathematical analysis.
Maria Gaetana Agnesi is best known from
the curve called the “Witch of Agnesi.”
Maria Gaetana Agnesi

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Caroline Herschel was born in 1750 into a
working class family in Hanover, Germany.
Typhus struck Caroline at age ten. This
stunted Caroline's growth; she never grew
past four foot three.
When Caroline was twenty-two, her
brother, William, took her away from her
home in Hanover to Bath, England. He felt
sympathy for his sister, and he needed a
housekeeper.
Caroline Herschel

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William Herschel had an obsession with
seeing deeper and deeper into space by
creating very powerful telescopes. After
Caroline arrived, his notoriety flourished in
England as a great telescope maker.
William trained her in mathematics, yet
she was still a house maid, not yet his
apprentice.
In time she began to help him in his
business.
Caroline Herschel

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Her first experience in mathematics was
her catalogue of nebulae.
She calculated the positions of her
brother's and her own discoveries and
amassed them into a publication.
One interesting fact is that Caroline never
learned her multiplication tables.
Caroline Herschel

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Sophie Germain was born in an era of
revolution. In the year of her birth, the
American Revolution began.
She was a middle class female who went
against the wishes of her family and the
social prejudices of the time to become a
highly recognized mathematician.
She is best known for her work in number
theory.
Her work in the theory of elasticity is also
very important to mathematics.
Sophie Germain

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Mary Fairfax Somerville was born on
December 26, 1780 in Jedburgh Scotland
“The Mechanism of the Heavens” was a
great success, probably the most famous
of her mathematical writings.
Mary Fairfax Somerville

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1800-1819
1820-1839
1840-1859

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Ada Byron
Lovelace

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Augusta Ada Byron was born December
10, 1815 the daughter of the illustrious
poet, Lord Byron.
In November, 1834 Ada heard Babbage’s
ideas for a new calculating engine, the
Analytical Engine and she was touched by
the "universality of his ideas".
Ada Byron Lovelace

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Babbage worked on plans for this new
engine and an Italian, Menabrea, wrote a
summary of what Babbage described and
published an article in French and Ada
translated Menabrea's article.
In her article, published in 1843, Lady
Lovelace's prescient comments included
her predictions that such a machine might
be used to compose complex music, to
produce graphics, and would be used for
both practical and scientific use. She was
correct.
Ada Byron Lovelace

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Ada suggested to Babbage writing a plan
for how the engine might calculate
Bernoulli numbers. This plan, is now
regarded as the first “computer program.”
A software language developed by the
U.S. Department of Defense was named
“Ada” in her honor in 1979.
Ada Byron Lovelace

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Florence
Nightingale
Mary Everest
Boole

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Florence Nightingale is most remembered
as a pioneer of nursing and a reformer of
hospital sanitation methods.
She developed the “polar-area diagram”
to dramatize the needless deaths caused
by unsanitary conditions and the need for
reform.
She was an innovator in the collection,
tabulation, interpretation, and graphical
display of descriptive statistics.
Florence Nightingale

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She also developed a Model Hospital
Statistical Form for hospitals to collect
and generate consistent data and
statistics.
She became a Fellow of the Royal
Statistical Society in 1858 and an honorary
member of the American Statistical
Association in 1874.
Karl Pearson acknowledged Nighingale as
a “prophetess” in the development of
applied statistics.
Florence Nightingale

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Mary Everest Boole was born in England in
1832.
At the age of 50, Mary began writing a
series of books and articles, publishing
them regularly until the time of her death.
Mary wrote and published her first book,
“The Preparation of the Child for Science,”
in 1904. This book ultimately had a great
impact on progressive schools in England
and the United States in the first part of
the twentieth century.
Mary Everest Boole

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She also invented “curve stitching,” or
what we call today, string geometry, to
help children learn about the geometry of
angles and spaces.
Mary considered herself a mathematical
psychologist. Her goal was to try "...to
understand how people, and especially
children, learned mathematics and
science, using the reasoning parts of their
minds, their physical bodies, and their
unconscious processes.
Mary Everest Boole

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Susan Jane Ellen Amanda
Cunningham
Elizaveta Fedorovna Hayes
Litvinova
Hertha Ayrton
Christine Ladd-
Ida Metcalf
Franklin
Sofia Charlotte Angas
KovalevskayaAnna Julia Scott
Cooper

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Susan Cunningham was born in Virginia.
She studied astronomy and mathematics
at Vassar College as a special student
during 1866-67.
In 1869 she helped to begin the astronomy
and mathematics departments for the
opening of Swarthmore College. She
headed those two departments until her
retirement from Swarthmore in 1906, rising
through the ranks from instructor to full
professor.
Susan Jane Cunningham

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In 1891 Cunningham was elected a
member of the New York Mathematical
Society (later to become the American
Mathematical Society), one of the first six
women to join this organization. She
remained a member until her death in
1921.
Susan Jane Cunningham

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She studied mathematics on her own in
Russia.
In 1872 she went to Zurich to study at the
Polytechnic Institute, receiving her
baccalaureate in 1876, and her doctoral
degree in 1878 from Bern University.
She published over 70 articles on the
philosophy and practice of teaching
mathematics.
Elizaveta Fedorovna Litvinova

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Christine Ladd was born in Windsor,
Connecticut on December 1, 1847.
She published solutions to mathematical
problems in the Educational Times of
London and the American journal The
Analyst, and even studied mathematics at
Harvard with W. E. Byerly and James Mills
Peirce.
Christine Ladd- Franklin

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At Johns Hopkins, Ladd developed her
interest in symbolic logic through the
lectures of Charles Sanders Peirce, writing
a dissertation on “The Algebra of Logic”
and publishing several more articles in The
Analyst.
Christine Ladd- Franklin

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An extraordinary woman, Sofia
Kovalevskaya (also known as Sonia
Kovalevsky) was not only a great
mathematician, but also a writer and
advocate of women's rights in the 19th
century.
At the end of 4 years in the University,
Sofia had produced three papers in the
hopes of being awarded a degree. The
first of these was entitled “On the Theory
of Partial Differential Equations.”
Sofia Kovalevskaya

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In 1880, she presented a paper on Abelian
integrals at a scientific conference and
was very well received.
She gained a tenured position at the
university, was appointed an editor for a
mathematics journal, published her first
paper on crystals, and in 1885, was also
appointed Chair of Mechanics.
Sofia Kovalevskaya

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In 1888, she entered her paper, “On the
Rotation of a Solid Body about a Fixed
Point,” in a competition for the Prix Bordin
by the French Academy of Science and
won.
Sofia Kovalevskaya

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Ellen Hayes was born in Granville, Ohio, a
town that her maternal grandparents
helped to found in 1805.
Hayes was the first member of the
Wellesley faculty to be given the title of
Assistant Professor in 1882, and
Associate Professor in 1883.
She was appointed Professor and head of
the mathematics department in 1888.
Ellen Amanda Hayes

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Her title was changed to Professor of
Applied Mathematics, and in 1904 to
Professor of Applied Mathematics and
Astronomy.
Hayes wrote several textbooks on Lessons
on Higher Algebra (1891, revised 1894),
Elementary Trigonometry (1896), and
Calculus with Applications, An Introduction
to the Mathematical Treatment of Science
(1900).
Ellen Amanda Hayes

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Phoebe Sarah Marks was born in Portsea,
England in 1854. She changed her first
name to Hertha when she was a teenager.
She passed the Mathematical Tripos in
1880, although with a disappointing Third
Class performance.
In 1884 she invented a draftsman's device
that could be used for dividing up a line
into equal parts as well as for enlarging
and reducing figures.
Hertha Ayrton

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She was also active in devising and
solving mathematical problems, many of
which were published in the Mathematical
Questions and Their Solutions from the
“Educational Times.”
She published several papers from her
own research in electric arcs in the
Proceedings of the Royal Society of
London and The Electrician, and published
the book “The Electric Arc” in 1902.
Hertha Ayrton

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Ida Metcalf was born in 1857.
In 1893 she became the second American
woman to receive a Ph.D. in mathematics
with a dissertation entitled “Geometric
Duality in Spaces.”
For a time she was an assistant to
Professor George Williams Jones in writing
his mathematical textbooks, drill books in
algebra and trigonometry, and logarithm
and interest tables.
Ida Martha Metcalf

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Charlotte Angas Scott overcame society's
disapproval by emerging as one of
England's first women to obtain a
doctorate in mathematics.
Charlotte wrote a book entitled “An
Introductory Account of Certain Modern
Ideas and Methods in Plane Analytical
Geometry” which was first published in
1894, reprinted thirty years later , and still
widely used.
Charlotte Angas Scott

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She is credited with being the author of the
first mathematical research paper written
in the US to be widely recognized in
Europe, “A Proof of Noether's
Fundamental Theorem,” Mathematische
Annalen, Vol. 52 (1899).
Charlotte Angas Scott

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Anna Haywood was born in Raleigh, North
Carolina, in 1858, the daughter of a slave
woman and her white master.
Cooper had a long and distinguished
career as a teacher, primarily at
Washington High School in Washington,
D.C.where she was originally hired to
teach mathematics and science, and later
as president of Frelinghuysen University, a
Washington school for adult education.
Anna Julia Haywood Cooper

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She was also well known as an author. Her
first book, “A Voice from the South: By a
Woman from the South,” published in
1892, is often considered as one of the
first articulations of Black Feminism.
Anna Julia Haywood Cooper