Woman in Science / With an Introductory Chapter on Woman's Long Struggle for Things of the Mind

by J. A. Zahm

In science Hypatia was among the women of antiquity what Sappho was in poetry and what Aspasia was in philosophy and eloquence—the chiefest glory of her sex. In profundity of knowledge and variety of attainments she had few peers among her contemporaries, and she is entitled to a conspicuous place among such luminaries of science as Ptolemy, Euclid, Apollonius, Diophantus and Hipparchus.[112]

It is a matter of regret to the admirers of this favored daughter of the Muses that she is absent from Raphael's School of Athens; but, had her achievements been as well known and appreciated in his day as they are now, we can readily believe that the incomparable artist would have found a place for her in this masterpiece with the matchless form and features of his beloved Fornarina.

After the death of Hypatia the science of mathematics remained stationary for many long centuries. Outside of certain Moors in Spain, the only mathematicians of note in Europe, until the Renaissance, were Gerbert, afterward Pope Silvester II, and Leonardo da Pisa. The first woman to attract special attention for her knowledge of mathematics was Heloise, the noted pupil of Abelard. According to Franciscus Ambrosius, who edited the works of Abelard and Heloise in 1616, the famous prioress of The Paraclete was a prodigy of learning, for besides having a knowledge of Latin, Greek and Hebrew, which was something extremely rare in her time, she was also well versed in philosophy, theology and mathematics, and inferior in these branches only to Abelard himself, who was probably the most eminent scholar of his age.[113]

Many Italian women, as we have seen in a preceding chapter, were noted for their proficiency in the various branches of mathematics. Some of the most distinguished of them flourished during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Among these were Elena Cornaro Piscopia, celebrated as a linguist as well as a mathematician; Maria Angela Ardinghelli, translator of the Vegetable Statics of Stephen Hales; Cristina Roccati, who taught physics for twenty-seven years in the Scientific Institute of Rovigo, and Clelia Borromeo, fondly called by her countrymen gloria Genuensium—the glory of the Genoese. In addition to a special talent for languages, she possessed so great a capacity for mathematics and mechanics that no problem in these sciences seemed to be beyond her comprehension.[114] Then there was also Diamante Medaglia, a mathematician of note, who wrote a special dissertation on the importance of mathematics in the curriculum of studies for women, Alle matematiche, alle matematiche prestino l'opera loro le donne, onde non cadano in crassi paralogismi—"To mathematics, to mathematics," she cries, "let women devote attention for mental discipline."[115]

The most illustrious, by far, of the women mathematicians of Italy was Maria Gaetana Agnesi, who was born in Milan in 1718 and died there at the age of eighty-one. At an early age she exhibited rare intelligence and soon distinguished herself by her extraordinary talent for languages. At the age of five she spoke French with ease and correctness, while only six years later she was able to translate Greek into Latin at sight and to speak the former as fluently as her own Italian. At the early age of nine she startled the learned men and women of her native city by discoursing for an hour in Latin on the rights of women to the study of science. This discourse—Oratio—was not, as usually stated, her own composition, but a translation from the Italian of a discourse written by her teacher of Latin. That a child of nine years should speak in the language of Cicero for a full hour before a learned assembly and without once losing the thread of her discourse was, indeed, a wonderful performance, and we are not surprised to learn that she was regarded by her countrymen as an infant prodigy.[116]

In addition to Italian, French, Latin and Greek, she was acquainted with German, Spanish and Hebrew. For this reason she was, like Elena Cornaro Piscopia, the famous "Venetian Minerva," called Oracolo Settilingue—Oracle of Seven Languages.[117]

But it was in the higher mathematics that Maria Gaetana was to win her chief title to fame in the world of learning. So successful had she been in her prosecution of this branch of science that she was, at the early age of twenty, able to enter upon her monumental work—Le Instituzioni Analitiche—a treatise in two large quarto volumes on the differential and integral calculus. To this difficult task she devoted ten years of arduous and uninterrupted labor. And if we may credit her biographer, she consecrated the nights as well as the days to her herculean undertaking. For frequently, after working in vain on a difficult problem during the day, she was known to bound from her bed during the night while sound asleep and, like a somnambulist, make her way through a long suite of rooms to her study, where she wrote out the solution of the problem and then returned to her bed. The following morning, on returning to her desk, she found, to her great surprise, that while asleep she had fully solved the problem which had been the subject of her meditations during the day and of her dreams during the night. Could the psychiatrist who so loves to deal with obscure mental phenomena find a more interesting case to engage his attention or one more worthy of the most careful investigation?

Finally Maria Gaetana's opus majus was completed and given to the public. It would be impossible to describe the sensation it produced in the learned world. Everybody talked about it; everybody admired the profound learning of the author, and acclaimed her: "Il portento del sesso, unico al Mondo"—the portent of her sex, unique in the world. By a single effort of her genius she had completely demolished that fabric of false reasoning which had so long been appealed to as proof positive of woman's intellectual inferiority, especially in the domain of abstract science. Maria Gaetana's victory was complete, and her victory was likewise a victory for her sex. She had demonstrated once for all, and beyond a quirk or quibble, that women could attain to the highest eminence in mathematics as well as in literature, that supreme excellence in any department of knowledge was not a question of sex but a question of education and opportunity, and that in things of the mind there was essentially no difference between the male and the female intellect.

The world saw in Agnesi a worthy accession to that noble band of gifted women who count among their number a Sappho, a Corinna, an Aspasia, a Hypatia, a Paula, a Hroswitha, a Dacier, an Isabella Rosales who, in the sixteenth century, successfully defended the most difficult theological theses in the presence of Paul III and the entire college of cardinals. And so delighted were the women—especially those in Italy—with the signal triumph of their eminent sister that they defied the traducers of their sex—muliebris sapientiæ infensissimis hostibus—to continue any longer their unreasonable campaign against the rights of women which were based on the intellectual equality of the two sexes.

So highly did the French Academy of Science value Agnesi's achievement that she would at once have been made a member of this learned body had it not been against the constitutions to admit a woman to membership. M. Motigny, one of the committee appointed by the Academy to report on the work, in his letter to the author, among other things, writes: "Permit me, Mademoiselle, to unite my personal homage to the plaudits of the entire Academy. I have the pleasure of making known to my country an extremely useful work which has long been desired, and which has hitherto"—both in France and in England—"existed only in outline. I do not know any work of this kind which is clearer, more methodic or more comprehensive than your Analytical Institutions. There is none in any language which can guide more surely, lead more quickly, and conduct further those who wish to advance in the mathematical sciences. I admire particularly the art with which you bring under uniform methods the divers conclusions scattered among the works of geometers and reached by methods entirely different."