Please reference as: Maria Tamboukou. 2025. "Numbers and Narratives: The end or the beginning?', https://sites.google.com/view/numbersandnarratives/newsletter/2025/may-2025/opening-reflections

Opening Reflections: Numbers and Narratives: The end or the begining?

Prof. Maria Tamboukou, Major Leverhulme Research Fellow, University of East London, UK

I had the pleasure of opening the Numbers and Narratives symposium with a talk that marked the final public event of my three-year research project on women in mathematics. Rather than attempting an exhaustive summary—which would have been impossible in a single presentation—I chose to share a series of moments, discoveries, and questions that have shaped the work, and that I hoped would serve as an opening gesture to the conversations that followed throughout the day.

The project began with a relatively contained idea: a feminist genealogy of women in mathematics, traced through their auto/biographical, literary, and philosophical writings. My initial focus was on six 18th- and 19th-century European figures—Du Châtelet, Agnesi, Germain, Somerville, Lovelace, and Kovalevskaya—most of whom came from aristocratic or bourgeois backgrounds. But it quickly became clear that these tidy sociological categories weren’t enough. The lives and legacies of these women refused to fit into neat boxes, and the existing historical frameworks often obscured more than they revealed. So I turned to the notion of the assemblage—or agencement—as a way to think more fluidly about difference, connection, and historical complexity.

In the first year of the project, I unexpectedly encountered Wang Zhenyi, an 18th-century Chinese mathematician, astronomer, and poet, whose literary works remain untranslated into any European language. Her presence in the margins of the archive signaled something vital: this wasn’t just a project about recovery, but about translation—literal and conceptual—and about creating conditions for new constellations to emerge.

As I continued my research and presented early findings to audiences in different countries and disciplines, I was repeatedly struck by how little-known many of these women still are. Even in cities where they lived and worked, even among mathematicians themselves, their names were often met with surprise. I remember a dinner in Turin—after a visit to the Ambrosiana Library in Milan—where none of the Italian mathematicians I spoke with recognized the name of Maria Gaetana Agnesi. The same happened in France with Émilie du Châtelet, and in Sweden with Sofia Kovalevskaya. At a conference in Ireland, I introduced Wang Zhenyi, only to have Chinese students approach me afterward to say they had never heard of her.

This recurring forgetfulness raised one of the key questions that guided my thinking: Why is memory important? And more specifically, how are remembering and forgetting actively shaped? In response, I began working with the concept of memory machines—by which I mean the archival and narrative assemblages that create, erase, or transform memory over time.

One of the greatest surprises of the project came not from the research itself, but from the challenge of writing a book about these women. I had imagined it would come together smoothly, especially after years of archival work and biographical study. But I soon realized that writing about them together—not just as individual figures, but as part of a shared intellectual and historical field—required a different conceptual approach. Inspired by Deleuze and Guattari, I turned to the idea of a plane of consistency, where diverse elements—ideas, events, affects, bodies—could coexist without hierarchy, without being forced into a single narrative arc.

And yet, the question lingered: What, if anything, connects them? The answer came—somewhat unexpectedly—through art. I recalled Yves Klein’s 1960 photograph Leap into the Void, which stages a moment of suspended gravity, of jumping toward the unknown. That image became a metaphor for the kind of mathematical work these women were doing. Each of them, in her own way, took a leap—into disciplinary gaps, into uncharted conceptual territories, into the very structures that excluded them. They weren’t simply filling a void; they were activating it, making it a space in which thought could happen.

Their mathematical practices were acts of becoming-mathematical, not linear progressions but creative deterritorialisations of received norms. From Du Châtelet’s metaphysical physics, to Agnesi’s calculus text in the shadow of Galileo, to Germain’s acoustics, Somerville’s transdisciplinary synthesis, Lovelace’s poetical science, and Kovalevskaya’s spinning top—each moment was a step into the unknown.

So what does this mean for the present? The persistent underrepresentation of women in mathematics was one of the provocations that began this work. But I’ve come to see this project not as a solution to that problem, but as a way of thinking differently. Of imagining new conditions. By engaging with the entangled histories of these women and tracing the assemblages that made their work possible—and impossible—we can begin to reimagine the futures of mathematics: who it is for, what it can do, and how we might think and write it otherwise.

The symposium’s papers unfolded beautifully from this starting point—each one offering its own leap into the void.