Edgeworth was one of a handful of women, alongside Joan of Arc, Sappho, and several saints, whom Auguste Comte included in his Calendar of Great Men—a landmark cultural biography of 559 world-changing minds, “worthiest of all ages & nations,” spanning from Euclid and Pythagoras to Kepler and Galileo to Beethoven and Milton. It was part of Comte’s proposal for a “positivist” solar calendar to replace the Gregorian, comprising thirteen months of twenty-eight days, each day named not for a religious saint but for a hero of secular culture—a scientist, poet, philosopher, painter, inventor,
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