The letter would seem surprising were it not like so many others that she wrote. It was an example of how her grandiose ambitions sometimes got the best of her. Nevertheless, she deserves respect as a person who, rising above the expectations of her background and gender and defying plagues of family demons, dedicated herself diligently to complex mathematical feats that most of us never would or could attempt. (Bernoulli numbers alone would defeat many of us.) Her impressive mathematical labors and imaginative insights came in the midst of the drama of Medora Leigh and bouts of illness that
...more
