He balked, but agreed to let her spend more time studying mathematics and theology. In 1739, she told her father she wanted to become a nun. When her mother died in childbirth in 1732, Agnesi was able to scale back her public performances, spending more time taking care of her younger siblings and increasingly influencing the course of her own education. David Eugene Smith Collection, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University Maria Agnesi, Instituziioni Analitiche, MIlan: 1748. The top figure is the curve now known as the Witch of Agnesi, from Agnesi's own textbook. Yet Mazzotti notes that Agnesi’s status as a child prodigy-coupled with her father’s wealth and ambition-did open “little windows of possibility” that allowed her to become educated and have more say in the direction of her life than many women of the era. The phenomenon of the girl prodigy “was one way of signaling talent and exceptional capacity and giving it some kind of socially acceptable form in a world that, strictly speaking, wouldn’t accept women in any of the places in which knowledge was being made and taught,” Mazzotti says. Massimo Mazzotti, a science historian at the University of California at Berkeley who wrote the book The World of Maria Gaetana Agnesi, Mathematician of God, calls it a strategy “of fashioning and controlling this phenomenon of the learned woman.” Wealthy families would provide their daughters with a limited education-literature, French, religion-but women could not attend school outside the home. Laura Bassi (1711-1778), a physicist from Bologna who became the first woman university professor in Europe, had been a child prodigy as well. The Agnesi sisters were two of several girl prodigies from northern Italy from around the same time. Pietro used his talented daughters to make his house an important stop in Milanese social circles. Gaetana would speak about topics in science and philosophy in several different languages, and her sister would play music, often of her own composition. Eager to elevate his family’s social status, he would have her and her musical prodigy sister Maria Teresa perform for guests at salons in the Palazzo Agnesi. She was a precocious student, particularly in the study of languages, and Pietro quickly recognized her talent. Her education probably began accidentally when tutors came by to instruct her younger brothers. Yet if we avoid the temptation to interpret her through our own lenses, we can begin to understand her on her own terms.īorn in 1718, Agnesi was the oldest child of Pietro Agnesi, a wealthy Milanese silk merchant. Reading Agnesi’s biography, one gets the feeling that she was constantly living in the shadow of society’s and her family’s expectations and desires for her. “It’s a great mathematical joke.” Whether he was being deliberately punny or not, Colson’s mistranslation has cemented Agnesi’s place in calculus classes. “It really is like a Freudian slip of the mathematical imagination to make the Italian word ‘curve’ into the Italian word for a diabolically possessed woman,” says Stanford University science historian Paula Findlen. That a devout Catholic woman who dedicated decades of her life to serving the poor should be perpetually associated with a witch via a curve she didn’t even invent is ironic to say the least.

It may also note that the name is a mistranslation of the Italian versiera, a term the mathematician Guido Grandi had coined based on the Latin for “turning curve,” which translator John Colson mistook for “avversiera,” which means she-devil-or, more succinctly, witch. If a modern math textbook says anything about the Agnesi for whom it is named, it will probably note that Maria Gaetana Agnesi was an 18th-century mathematician who became the first woman to write a major calculus textbook. It’s nothing more than a gentle, sloping curve. It doesn’t look much like a witch, or a hat or even a broomstick. The witch of Agnesi, you may be disappointed to know, is a curve that math students generally learn about in calculus class.

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