Numbers and Narratives - To talk of many things in the feminine

“To talk of many things” in the feminine: a study of social and narrative representations of/by women mathematicians, from autobiographies to Wikipedia

Dr Odile Chatirichvili, Université de Toulouse, France

How are social representations and models influencing narrative forms, and vice-versa, in the case of a discipline which is at the same time extremely prestigious, arcane for the general public, and under-feminised? How can women mathematicians put pen to paper in order to tell their stories, and how can those stories tackle the subjects of under-feminisation and sexism of the mathematical community? Are there “feminine” or “feminist” ways to tell those (auto)mathographies? Are the new media and technologies of communication proper ways to alter the narratives?

In this paper, I intend to present the questions, methods, and first results of my postdoc project “REVIMA – Life Narratives of/by Women Mathematicians”. This work comes within the scope of the collective research project “Wiki-F – Wikipedia and Women Scientists” (Université de Toulouse, France) which examines the representation of women scientists on Wikipedia.

In collaboration with this team, my goal is to explore how life narratives of women mathematicians are made, arranged, and influenced, in a various range of contemporary material such as published auto/biographies and other forms of life testimonies, and including Wikipedia pages. To this end, I will use discourse analysis and implement lexicometric tools, as well as a sociological approach based on gender studies. The case of Sofia Kovalevskaia is already well documented; it is a starting point from which I will explore the cases of more contemporary women mathematicians (such as Michèle Audin, Julia Robinson, and Katherine Ollerenshaw whose autobiography lends its title to this paper).

Chatirichvili_London_presentation.pdf

Afterthoughts

At the core of Chatirichvili’s inquiry lies the tension between lived experience and public representation. She examined how women mathematicians narrate their careers and challenges, focusing not just on content but on form—how genres like biography, autobiography, or encyclopedia entries shape what can be said and by whom. Her research foregrounds the cultural filters and narrative conventions that structure visibility.

This resonates strongly with the Numbers and Narratives project. While my work centers on the archival, literary, and philosophical traces left by women in mathematics, Chatirichvili highlights the discursive infrastructures that determine how such traces are voiced and received.

By showing how narrative itself becomes a site of struggle, her talk deepened our shared commitment to challenging exclusionary forms of memory. Her feminist attention to voice, mediation, and genre aligns with the project’s push beyond conventional biography and static archive—toward practices of memory work, narrative plurality, and epistemic justice.