February 2025

Mapping assemblages

Please reference as: Maria Tamboukou. 2025. 'Mapping Assemblages', https://sites.google.com/view/numbersandnarratives/newsletter/2025/february-2025

As Numbers and Narratives: A Feminist Genealogy of Automathographies enters its final phase, I have been thinking and writing about all six women mathematicians in their interrelation. This process has been far more challenging than I initially anticipated.

After years of archival excavation and deep immersion in the extensive literature surrounding their lives and work, I assumed that weaving their narratives together would be a reflective, almost seamless endeavour. Instead, it has required a fundamental shift in approach. Studying each woman individually provided a strong foundation, and drawing bilateral comparisons yielded valuable insights—but bringing them all into a shared analytical space demanded something more.

Rather than simply juxtaposing their lives, I found myself constructing an assemblage—a dynamic configuration of mathematics, philosophy, and the literary arts. This approach has not only illuminated the distinct historical and geographical contexts that shaped these women’s intellectual trajectories but also revealed the untapped potentialities within their work. Thinking of them together is not just an act of synthesis but an invitation to reimagine the very contours of mathematical history. As the project moves toward its conclusion, this challenge remains an ongoing, generative process—one that continues to transform my understanding of these remarkable women and the entangled histories they inhabit. Here are some initial thoughts and lines in mapping assemblages:

Class and gender reconsidered in the wake of public science

All six women came of age during the rise of public science, benefiting—albeit differently—from the educational opportunities afforded to daughters of the upper classes. Émilie du Châtelet, Ada Lovelace, and Sofia Kovalevskaya were aristocrats; Maria Gaetana Agnesi and Sophie Germain were born into wealthy merchant families; and only Mary Somerville belonged to the minor gentry, a class we might now equate with the middle class. Yet privilege alone does not account for their mathematical achievements. It was in how they positioned themselves within and beyond their class inheritances that new modes of intellectual engagement emerged.

Rather than a simple hierarchy of access or exclusion, what materializes is a network of 'relations of exteriority' within the assemblage—a dynamic interplay of constraints and possibilities that shaped their work in mathematics, philosophy, and the literary arts. These relations were not defined by class alone but by their navigation of gendered expectations, institutional barriers, and the transdisciplinary nature of their inquiries.

Mapping these assemblages—of class, gender, and intellectual formation—reveals not a fixed structure but a plane of consistency across variation. This is where their work gains new meaning: not in isolation, but in the tensions and affinities that emerge when their trajectories are placed in conversation.

Rhizomatic Connections

As the assemblages of class and gender take form, another crucial dimension emerges: the relational networks that shaped the intellectual and personal trajectories of women mathematicians. These networks did not exist in isolation but in dynamic juxtaposition, revealing the interplay between constraint and possibility, structure and fluidity.

Across their lives, key male figures—fathers, tutors, mentors, friends, lovers, and colleagues—were not merely passive enablers but active participants in assemblages that both reinforced and, at times, destabilized patriarchal structures. Their support was embedded within larger formations of power, creating spaces of negotiation rather than simple acts of permission or restriction. Yet if these male alliances provided access to intellectual communities, it was often connections with other women—friends, sisters, daughters, and collaborators—that proved most transformative.

These relationships did not function as fixed hierarchies but as rhizomatic formations—dynamic, nonlinear, and resistant to rigid categorization. Mothers, in particular, occupied polarizing roles, either distant and absent or omnipresent and stifling, generating ambivalent forces that shaped their daughters' intellectual trajectories. While familial ties sometimes provided continuity, it was women’s friendships that most frequently created planes of consistency, sustaining and amplifying the flows of thought that institutional and social limitations might have otherwise diverted or constrained.

These relationships were not static but lines of flight—vectors of movement within structures that sought to territorialize intellectual space. Women mathematicians, whether through bonds with friends, fellow scholars, or collaborators, formed assemblages of solidarity that redistributed affective and intellectual intensities. These networks were not merely sites of support; they actively disrupted hierarchical systems, opening up new pathways for thought and creation. Through these assemblages, women emerged as singularities within fields otherwise dominated by molar structures of exclusion.

These connections were catalytic, allowing for a becoming that transcended the limits imposed by gendered norms. Yet, their dynamics were far from uniform—each relationship carried its own tensions, possibilities, and constraints. Mapping these networks reveals not a singular feminist genealogy but a shifting, complex web of relations, where the unforeseen and the unthinkable found space to emerge.

Leaps into the void

I thought a lot about what I would configure as a line that weaves into the different entanglements and variations of women mathematicians'actions and writings and the notion of a leap into the unknown is what I have come up with, perhaps inspired by Yve Klein's emblematic photograph, 'Leap into the void'.

Mathematics, like artistic creation, is an encounter with the unknown—a leap into the unproven, the unresolved, the yet-to-be. The women mathematicians in this study took such leaps, not as acts of defiance, but as participations in the generative flux of mathematical becoming. Their work blurred distinctions between the personal and intellectual, creativity and rigor, the known and the possible.

Far from linear or predictable, their mathematical practices unfolded in liminal spaces of inquiry, where new connections and assemblages formed. They took intellectual and personal risks, tackling abstract problems and pioneering innovative ideas, often without institutional support or recognition. For them, mathematics was both a discipline and a site of resistance—where existing frameworks could be challenged, and new paths forged.

By venturing into the unknown, these women did more than contribute to mathematics; they redefined what it meant to be a mathematician. Each theorem, correspondence, or proof was not merely a solution but a moment of opening—a line of flight connecting them to broader assemblages of knowledge, history, and imagination. Their leaps into the unknown were not simply acts of will but expressions of immanence, where the becoming of the mathematician and the potential of mathematics converged into something new, something unexpected, and something yet to come.

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