The Scientific Archive
Primary Sources
Maria Gaetana Agnesi. 1748. Instituzioni analitiche ad uso della gioventù italiana, Milan: Nella Regia-Ducal Corte (2 vols). [Translated as Analytical Institutions for the Use of Italian Youth, by John Colson, London: Taylor and Wilks, 1801]
Agnesi’s best-known work, Instituzioni analitiche ad uso della gioventù italiana (1748; “Analytical Institutions for the Use of Italian Youth”), in two huge volumes, provided a remarkably comprehensive and systematic treatment of algebra and analysis, including such relatively new developments as integral and differential calculus. In this text is found a discussion of the Agnesi curve, a cubic curve known in Italian as versiera, which was confused with versicra (“witch”) and translated into English as the “Witch of Agnesi.”
Reviews of the work at the time of its publication
Anon. 1749. Review of Agnesi’s Instituzioni analitiche in Novelle letterarie 10(31), col. 492-496; (37), col. 586-587.
Anon. 1750. Review of Agnesi’s Instituzioni analitiche in Journal des Scavans, 309-310.
Anon. 1750. Review of Agnesi’s Instituzioni analitiche in Nova Acta Eruditorum n. 13, 605-609.
Anon. 1750. Review of Agnesi’s Instituzioni analitiche in Novelle della Repubblica Letteraria n. 23, 180-181.
Anon. 1750. Review of Agnesi’s Instituzioni analitiche in Lettres sur quelques écrits de ce temps, Tome III, Genève et Amsterdam, Pierre Mortier, p. 66–71.
de Mairan, Dortous 1749. Review of Agnesi’s Instituzioni analitiche in Les registres de l’académie royale des Sciences (republished in A. F. Frisi 1799. Elogio storico di D. Maria Gaetana Agnesi, Milano: Presso Giuseppe Galeazzi).
Selected Secondary Sources
Alexanderson, Gerald. "About the Cover: Maria Gaetana Agnesi—A Divided Life," Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, Vol. 5, No. 1 (January 2013), 147-152.
Cupillari, Antonella. "Maria Gaetana Agnesi's Other Curves (More than Just the Witch," Mathematics Magazine, 87(1) (February 2014), 3-13.
Gray, S.I.B. and Tagui Malakyan. "The Witch of Agnesi: A Lasting Contribution from the First Surviving Mathematical Work Written by a Woman," College Mathematics Journal, 30(4) (Sept. 1999), 258-268.
Mazzone, Silvia, Roero, Clara Silvia with the collaboration of Luciano, Erika (Eds.), 2010. L’epistolario di Jacopo, Vin-cenzo e Giordano Riccati con Ramiro Rampinelli e Maria Gaetana Agnesi. http://bibdig.museogalileo.it/Teca/Viewer?an=000000990843. Florence: Olschki.
Roero, Clara Silvia. 2015. 'M.G. Agnesi, R. Rampinelli and the Riccati family: A cultural fellowship formed for an important scientific purpose, the Instituzioni analitiche. Historia Mathematica 42, 296–314.
Soppelsa, Maria Laura. “Jacopo Riccati—Maria Gaetana Agnesi: carteggio 1745–1751.” Annali dell’Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza di Firenze 10 (1985): 117–59.
Truesdell, C. "Maria Gaetana Agnesi." Archive for History of Exact Sciences. 1989, 40: 433 113-142.
Truesdell, C. "Corrections and Additions for 'Maria Gaetana Agnesi'," Archive for History of Exact Sciences. 1992, 43: 385-386.
Zen, Stefano, Maria Gaetana Agnesi tra Newton et Leibniz , Roma: Aracne editrice, 2017.