April 2023

I immensely enjoyed the first seminar on this project, where I had the opportunity to share ideas and emerging themes with a wide network of fellow researchers, members of the International Advisory Board, colleagues, PhD students, as well as teachers and class practitioners. Some of the comments and highlights of the seminar included:

• Thank you Maria, this has been so interesting. As a classroom practitioner, it gives me a lot to think about in terms of challenging this and dispelling the idea of the exceptional woman going forward. 

• Your reference to love and happiness put a smile on my face: I feel so happy when I do mathematics!

• I really enjoyed your seminar. Your explanation of complex concepts was beautifully clear. You gave the best (and most succinct) explanation of the Event that I have heard to date. Your presentation also helped me articulate some things I have been thinking about in my own work. It is a really important project and I love the way you are theorising it and how theory and archival work diffract in what is emerging.

There were also some very important questions and comments around the problematics of translation and working with different languages and documents, the issue of excavating non-western archives, the idea of the laboratory letter, as well as links with the present in terms of intersectional inequalities:

• You spoke in the presentation about working with different types of archival documents. My first question relates to working with texts and translations in a range of languages. I have the sense that the women mathematicians use different languages/ translations. Did they also translate documents? How do different languages/translates relate for the women in terms of the Self  for (given what you have written about translation, the Self and feminist discourse in Sewing, Fighting, Writing and elsewhere). How did languages/ translation play into their becoming Mathematicians? Given your own facility with various languages, how are you thinking about your relation to working with different languages and different types of translated texts, primary and secondary? How might this depend on the language concerned or the translation concerned and how might that be playing out in what is emerging in the project?

• Your Chinese example made me wonder about women in Moslem/Arab/Ottoman worlds, where I haven’t to date come across any early mathematicians.

• What do you call laboratory letters and said some really interesting things about being part of a wider phenomenon. They have been written about in relation to male scientists, including some mathematicians, and the origins of journal articles and they seem part of a wider set of things.

These are great questions and of course translation has emerged as an important theme in the analysis, which will further be expanded as the project unfolds.