A History of Women in Mathematics

Exploring the Trailblazers of STEM

Dale DeBakcsy

• Publisher: Pen & Sword History
• Year: 2023
• eBook ISBN: 9781399056533
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Women in History
• Index: History

From ancient Greece to medieval Baghdad, from Revolutionary France to China's Qing Dynasty, women mathematicians have worked alongside men to a degree that was denied them in most other fields of scientific inquiry. Locked out of biological studies first by restrictions on their freedom of travel and later because of concerns that they would be corrupted by evolutionary thought, effectively barred from experimental physics for centuries through lack of access to specialized equipment, and inconsistently permitted a medical education, women have, for three thousand years and more, been a steady presence during every great mathematical era. They have contributed to the fundamentals of geometry and the expansion of algebra from the earliest days of those disciplines, and stepped in, on multiple occasions, to save the mathematical traditions of their home countries from death by ossification. They have guided us through the twisted realms of non-Euclidean space, gifted us the mathematical models we need to understand the behavior of the metals of our buildings and the soils we construct them upon, and given us an at times chilling view into the fates of super-massive systems over deep time. A History of Women in Mathematics, the first comprehensive account of women's role in mathematics in 35 years, tells the stories of over a hundred women, some of whom had to go to the lengths of lying about their gender in correspondence, or secrete themselves behind screens during lectures to access the mathematical resources that their male counterparts took for granted, but many of whom had positions of academic honor and international prestige that women in other fields would have to wait centuries to attain. From Theano of Croton to Rachel Riley, here are the tales of the women who have illuminated and demystified the profound structures upon which our reality is built, with stones of number and mortar of imagination.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• A Note on Inclusion
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Theano of Croton and the Pythagorean Women of Ancient Greece
• Chapter 2 Hypatia of Alexandria: Philosopher, Mathematician, Political Casualty
• Chapter 3 The Algebraist of Baghdad: Sutayta Al’Mahamali’s Medieval Mathematics
• Chapter 4 Genius Overcome: The Destruction of Catherine de Parthenay
• Chapter 5 Brief Portraits: Antiquity to the Early Modern Era
• Chapter 6 Sex, Cards and Calculus: A Day with Emilie du Chatelet
• Chapter 7 The Curve Who Became a Witch: The Geometric Calculus of Maria Gaetana Agnesi
• Chapter 8 Primal Screams: Sophie Germain’s Mathematical Labours
• Chapter 9 Mary Somerville: Saviour of British Mathematics
• Chapter 10 Sofia Kovalevskaya: Love Makes all the Partial Difference
• Chapter 11 The Englishwoman in America: Charlotte Angas Scott and the Development of American Mathematics
• Chapter 12 Spherical Triangles and Domineering Males: The Saga of Grace Chisholm Young
• Chapter 13 Brief Portraits: The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
• Chapter 14 Emmy Noether Solves the Universe
• Chapter 15 Hilda Geiringer and the Curious Behaviour of Stressed Metals
• Chapter 16 Fearless Symmetry: Dorothy Wrinch and the Founding of Mathematical Biochemistry
• Chapter 17 In Defence of the Soil: One Century with Hydrodynamic Mathematician Pelageya Polubarinova-Kochina
• Chapter 18 Letting Loose the Dogs of Chaos: Mary Lucy Cartwright’s Pioneering Portrayals of Functions Behaving Badly
• Chapter 19 Equilibrium States: Tatyana Alexeyevna Ehrenfest-Afanassjewa and the Development of Statistical Mechanics
• Chapter 20 Master of Matrices: Olga Taussky-Todd and How One of Mathematics’ Coolest Objects Refound its Groove
• Chapter 21 Varieties: The Life and Mathematics of Hanna Neumann
• Chapter 22 Trajectories: Katherine Johnson’s Orbital Mathematics
• Chapter 23 Julia Robinson and the Cracking of Hilbert’s Tenth Problem
• Chapter 24 Bringing the Computers of Earth to the Problems of Space: Evelyn Boyd Granville and the Early Days of IBM at NASA
• Chapter 25 Impossible Creatures and How to Make Them: The Topological Legacy of Mary Ellen Rudin
• Chapter 26 Non-Linear: How Mathematical Lone Wolf Karen Uhlenbeck Found Her Pack
• Chapter 27 Expectations Defied: The Algebraic Journey of Raman Parimala
• Chapter 28 The Billion Roads from Here to There: The Graph Theory Combinatorics of Fan Chung
• Chapter 29 It Came from Teichmuller Space! The Mathematical Adventures of Maryam Mirzakhani
• Chapter 30 Brief Portraits: The Modern Age
• So, What Precisely Does that … Mean? A Glossary of Mathematical Terms
• Building Your Own Women in Mathematics Library: A Selected Bibliography
• Plates