For most people, mathematics is a daunting subject. As a science of structure, order, and relation, it demands analytical and, particularly in the modern era, increasingly abstract thought. For many years, the only individuals thought capable of dealing in logic, quantitative calculation, and abstraction were men. Yet, throughout history, women too have made significant contributions to mathematics.
Here, as part of the Britannica Blog series on Women in History 2011, we take a look at five women who beat the odds, becoming celebrated for their genius and mathematical talent.
In the late 4th and early 5th centuries, Egyptian Neoplatonist philosopher Hypatia emerged as the first notable woman in mathematics. She was born in Alexandria around 355, and her father was Theon, a respected mathematician and philosopher. Hypatia became known for her intellectual abilities, and around 400 she became the head of Alexandria’s Neoplatonist school of philosophy. From the few records that have been recovered, it appears that Hypatia’s work was concerned primarily with astronomy and mathematics. Despite her genius, however, because of a political turn of events marked by intolerance to paganism (with which learning and science and hence Hypatia) were associated, she was falsely suspected of political intrigue and suffered a violent death at the hands of a Christian mob.
Italian mathematician and philosopher Maria Gaetana Agnesi was considered to be the first woman in the modern Western world to have achieved a reputation in mathematics. Agnesi was an intellectually precocious child. She reportedly mastered multiple languages and composed essays on natural philosophy at an early age. According to Britannica:
Agnesi’s best-known work, Instituzioni analitiche ad uso della gioventù italiana (1748; “Analytical Institutions for the Use of Italian Youth”), in two huge volumes, provided a remarkably comprehensive and systematic treatment of algebra and analysis, including such relatively new developments as integral and differential calculus. In this text is found a discussion of the Agnesi curve, a cubic curve known in Italian as versiera, which was confused with versicra (“witch”) and translated into English as the “Witch of Agnesi.” The French Academy of Sciences, in its review of the Instituzioni, stated that: “We regard it as the most complete and best made treatise.”
Sophie Germain was a French mathematician who became known for her studies of acoustics, elasticity, and number theory. Aware of the challenges she faced as a woman interested in mathematics, Germain very early in her career came up with the pseudonym M. Le Blanc, under which she not only secured lecture notes for courses from the École Polytechnique in Paris but also struck up a letter correspondence with celebrated German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss (though he later discovered her true identity).
Germain’s interests in providing mathematical explanations for vibration and elasticity brought her into contact with other prominent early 19th-century scientists, including renowned French mathematician Joseph Fourier. She later became more deeply interested in number theory and outlined a general solution to Fermat’s last theorem. Her strategy enabled Adrien-Marie Legendre‘s proof of the theorem for the case n = 5. (A proof devised for all cases was published in 1995 by English mathematician Andrew Wiles.)
German mathematician Emmy Noether was known for her innovations in higher algebra, for which she became recognized as the most creative abstract algebraist of modern times. Noether made her mark as an extraordinary mathematician early in her career, with Concerning Moduli in Noncommutative Fields, Particularly in Differential and Difference Terms (1920; cowritten with Werner Schmeidler). From there, she began to tackle theories that brought together a number of mathematical breakthroughs. As Britannica recounts:
From 1927 Noether concentrated on noncommutative algebras (algebras in which the order in which numbers are multiplied affects the answer), their linear transformations, and their application to commutative number fields. She built up the theory of noncommutative algebras in a newly unified and purely conceptual way. In collaboration with Helmut Hasse and Richard Brauer, she investigated the structure of noncommutative algebras and their application to commutative fields by means of cross product (a form of multiplication used between two vectors).
Grace Murray Hopper, an American mathematician and rear admiral in the U.S. Navy, was a pioneer in computer technology. She helped devise UNIVAC I, the first commercial electronic computer, and she contributed to the development of naval applications for COBOL (common-business-oriented language). In 1944, after becoming a lieutenant in the Naval Reserve, she was assigned to a project at Harvard University, where she worked on the protocomputer Mark I. When a moth infiltrated Mark I’s circuits, causing failures, she came up with the term bug to describe such unexplained computer problems. During her later career, Hopper contributed to the development of the first English-language data-processing compiler (Flow-Matic) and helped standardize the U.S. Navy’s computer languages.