October 2023

Archival Troubles, Conferences and Publications

Please reference as: Maria Tamboukou. 2023. 'Archival Troubles, Conferences and Publications', https://sites.google.com/view/numbersandnarratives/newsletter/october-2023

October was a busy month in terms of archival work, publications and conferences.
In the first week of October my paper Ever yours, mathematically’: women’s letters and the mathematical imagination was published on-line first and open access in Gender and Education. While doing underpinning research for this project I had been reading Mary Somerville's and Ada Lovelace's correspondence, which gave me the idea of writing a paper about their letters, but what I had not realized then is that neither in their letters, nor in Somerville's published memoir was there any indication that they knew of Sophie Germain's work, despite the fact that they were both well-travelled and well versed in the literature of mathematical sciences. Moreover, Somerville had visited Paris in 1817 and she and her husband, William Somerville, had dined and wined with many of the members of the Paris Academy of Sciences that had awarded Germain the Grand Prix de Mathématiques for her mathematical theory of vibrations of general curved and plane elastic surfaces, only a year earlier in 1816.

As I noted in the paper, Germain was a single woman and did not have many opportunities for being invited to dinner parties or otherwise socializing with scientists and their wives, in the way Mr and Mrs Sommerville were. Although scholars in the field have pointed to the importance of scientific households in the circulation of mathematics in nineteenth century Britain (see Dunning and Stenhouse 2021), it seems that such arrangements were limited for single women like Germain, despite her important and original contribution in the mathematical sciences in postrevolutionary France. As I suggested in the paper, it is perhaps on the grounds of such heteropatriarchal regimes that Somerville never met Germain in Paris and subsequently Lovelace never read Germain's philosophical work, despite their mutual interest in the role of imagination in science.

What I also highlighted in this paper is the role of epistolary education in filling the gaps in women's mathematical knowledge given their exclusion from universities and scientific academies throughout the nineteenth century and before. While the role of mathematical correspondences has been acknowledged in the literature, it has mostly been studied as letters bewteen women and men. What we have in the Somerville-Lovelace correspondence is a rare educational epistolary relationship between two women mathematicians, that also crosses boundaries between age and social status.

In the first week of October I also attended The Epistolary Research Network (TERN) 2023 Conference on the topic of time. My paper, 'Letters, Gender and Mathematics: an award letter too late to receive', was about the delay of Sophie Germain's award letter of the prestigious Grand Prix de Mathématiques in 1816, which resulted in her not attending the award ceremony at the French Institute.

This is how the Journal des Débats, commented on this event on Tuesday, January 9, 1816:

The class of mathematical and physical sciences of the Institute held its public session today, a very large assembly that attracted without doubt those desiring to see a virtuoso of a new kind, Miss Sophie Germain, to whom the prize for elastic membranes was to be awarded. The expectation of the public was deceived: the young lady did not go to take the trophy that no one of her gender has ever received in France.

In the paper at the TERN2023 conference I also talked about Germain's troubled archive, as already discussed in the May 2023 newsletter in relation to my visit to the Moreniana library in Florence.
In the context of archival troubles then, I look forward to my archival work this year at the Bodleian Libraries in Oxford, where I revisit Mary Somerville's and Ada Lovelace's papers, reading them diffractively not only through each other, but also through the insights, ideas, questions and problematics I have gathered by engaging with the letters of all six women of the project.
My archival research at the British Library with the correspondence between Charles Babbage, Mary Somerville and Ada Lovelace has already started since September, so the archival vibes are in full swing.

References
Dunning, David E., and Brigitte Stenhouse. 2021. “Marriages, Couples, and the Making of Mathematical Careers.” London Mathematical Society Newsletter 493: 50–54.