Traités Élémentaires De Calcul Différentiel Et De Calcul Intégral

by Maria Gaetana Agnesi

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536 pages, Hardcover

Published May 6, 2016

About the author

Analytical Institutions (1748), influential textbook of noted Italian mathematician Maria Gaetana Agnesi, summarized existing knowledge about algebra and calculus.

Pietro Agnesi, her wealthy father, made his money as a silk merchant and perhaps also a mathematics professor and produced this child with Anna Fortunata Brivio, his first wife. The best tutors taught her; recognized early as a child prodigy, she could speak Italian and French at five years of age in 1723 and also learned Greek, Hebrew, Spanish, German, and Latin before her eleventh birthday in 1729. She studied ballistics and geometry before fourteen years of age in 1732. Her father in 1733 began to host gatherings in his house of learned men at which his fifteen-year-old daughter ably displayed her knowledge. Charles de Brosses gives records of these meetings in Lettres sur l'Italie and in the Propositiones Philosophicae, which the father published in 1738. After the death of mother of Maria, the father remarried twice, and Maria responsibly taught her many younger siblings. Maria Teresa Agnesi Pinottini, clavicembalist and composer, was her sister.

Agnesi wanted to enter a convent, which her father refused, but he eventually agreed to let her devote herself to the study of mathematics. She became the first woman in Italy to write a mathematics handbook, Instituzioni analitiche ad uso della gioventù italiana (Analytical Institutions for the Use of Italian Youth, 1748), a comprehensive and systematic treatment of algebra and analysis, including both differential and integral calculus. In 1750, she was appointed to the chair of mathematics at the University of Bologna, only the second woman ever to be granted professorship at a university, but she never took it up. Near the end of her life, she spent her time studying theology and doing charitable work for the poor and sick.