82 4. WOMEN MATHEMATICIANSproduced three notable women mathematicians, whose biographies exhibit some
noticeable similarities and some equally noticeable differences.
3.1. Continental mathematicians. The first two of three prominent eighteenth-
century women mathematicians were the Marquise du Chatelet and Maria Gaetana
Agnesi. Both were given strong classical educations at the insistence of their fa-
thers, both took a strong interest in science, and both wrote expository works that
incorporated their own original ideas. Apart from those similarities, however, there
are a great many differences between the two women, beyond the obvious fact that
the Marquise du Chatelet was French and Maria Gaetana Agnesi was Italian.
The Marquise du Chatelet. The Marquise du Chatelet was born Gabrielle-Emilie
Tonnelier de Breteuil, the daughter of a court official of the "Sun King" Louis XIV,
in 1706. She was presented at court at age 16, married to a nobleman at 19, and
had a number of lovers throughout her life. She bore several children and died in
1749, apparently of complications from the birth of a child; she was 42 years old at
the time.
In a preface to her translation and reworking of an English book entitled The
Fable of the Bees, she wrote eloquently about the situation of women in general,
and the difficulties she herself faced, saying
I am convinced that many women are either unaware of their tal-
ents by reason of the fault in their education or that they bury
them on account of prejudice for want of intellectual courage. My
own experience confirms this. [Ehrman, 1986, p. 61]
As a teenager Gabrielle-Emilie received encouragement to study mathematics
from a family friend, M. de Mezieres, but would have had contact with science
in any case, just from being in a home where intellectual questions were taken
seriously. Her scientific interests were in the area known as natural philosophy,
which was the physics and chemistry of the time, but contained strong admixtures
of philosophical doctrines that have since been purged. In 1740 she published
Institutions de physique, in which she attempted a synthesis of the ideas of Newton,
Descartes, and Leibniz. Five years later, she began the work for which she is
best remembered, a French translation, with commentary, of Newton's Philosophies
naturalis principia mathematica. This work was published in 1756, seven years
after her death.
Maria Gaetana Agnesi. In contrast to the Marquise du Chatelet, Maria Gaetana
Agnesi much preferred a simple, spartan life, even though her father was the heir
to a fortune made in the silk trade. Born in 1718 in Bologna, which at the time was
located in the Papal States, she wanted to be a nun, and only her father's plead-
ing prevented her from going to a convent as a young woman. She never married
and spent her time at home in activities that would be appropriate to a convent,
reading religious books, praying, and studying mathematics.^8 She was encouraged
in her interest in mathematics by a monk who was also a mathematician and who
frequently visited her father. In the preface to her book Istituzioni analitiche ad
uso della gioventu italiana, she expressed her gratitude for this support, saying
(^8) If those three activities seem incongruous, one should keep in mind that a considerable portion
of the women mathematicians in the United States during the 1930s were nuns.