- MODERN EUROPEAN WOMEN 83
that, despite her strong interest in mathematics, she would have gotten lost with-
out his instruction. Using the famous mathematician Jacopo Riccati (1676-1754),
for whom the Riccati equation is named, as an editor, she worked methodically on
this textbook for many years. Riccati even gave her some of his own results on
integration. The work was published in two volumes in 1748 and 1749 and imme-
diately recognized as a masterpiece of organization and exposition, earning praise
from the Paris Academy of Sciences. The Pope at the time, Benedict XIV, had
an interest in mathematics, and he appointed her to a position as reader at the
University of Bologna. Soon afterward, the Academy of Bologna offered her the
chair of mathematics at the university, and the Pope confirmed this offer.
However, she does not seem to have accepted the offer. Her name remained on
the rolls at the university, but she devoted herself to her charitable work, with ever
more zeal after her father died in 1752. She gave away her fortune to the poor and
died in poverty in 1799.
As is often the case with people who are kept away from full participation in
scientific circles, the originality of Maria Agnesi's work is in the organization of
the material. The small part of it that has immortalized her name is a curve that
she called la versiera, meaning the twisted curve. It was translated into English by
her contemporary John Colson, but the translation was not published until 1801.
Colson apparently confused la versiera with I'avversiera, which means wife of the
devil. Accordingly he gave this curve the name witch of Agnesi, a name that has
unfortunately stuck to it and is both sad and ironic, considering the exemplary
character of its author.^9
Sophie Germain. Even though she was born much later than Maria Gaetana Agnesi
and the Marquise du Chatelet, the third prominent woman mathematician of the
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Marie-Sophie Germain, was more isolated
from the intellectual world than her two predecessors. She was born in Paris during
the reign of Louis XVI, on April 1, 1776. Like Maria Gaetana Agnesi, her family
had grown wealthy in the silk trade, and the family home was a center of intellectual
activity. She, however, was strongly discouraged from scientific studies by her family
and had to stay up late and study the works of Newton and Euler (1707-1783),
teaching herself Latin in order to do so. Her persistence finally won acceptance,
and she was allowed to remain unmarried and devoted to her studies. Even so,
those studies were not easy to conduct. Even after the French Revolution, she was
not allowed to attend school. She did venture to send some of her work to Joseph-
Louis Lagrange (1736-1813) under the pseudonym "M. LeBlanc," work he found
sufficiently impressive to seek her out. He was her only mentor, but the relationship
between them was not nearly so close as that between Sof'ya Kovalevskaya and
her adviser Weierstrass 80 years later. She conducted a famous correspondence
with Adrien-Marie Legendre (1752-1833) on problems of number theory, some of
which he included in the second edition of his treatise on the subject. Later she
corresponded with Carl Friedrich Wilhelm Gauss (1777-1855), again disguised as
"M. LeBlanc." Although they shared a love for number theory, the two never met
face to face. Sophie Germain proved a special case of Fermat's last theorem, which
asserts that there are no nonzero integer solutions of a" + bn = c" when ç > 2.
Her special case assumes that the prime number ç does not divide a, b, or c and
(^9) Despite the widely recognized name witch of Agnesi, Agnesi was not the first person to study
this curve.