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Surging Knowledges
Surging Knowledges
Women Mathematicians in the Realm of Public Science
Women Mathematicians in the Realm of Public Science
Please reference as: Maria Tamboukou. 2025. 'Surging Knowledges: Women Mathematicians in the Realm of Public Science', https://sites.google.com/view/numbersandnarratives/newsletter/2025/july-2025
As the Numbers and Narratives project runs its final months, I find myself returning to the concept of surging knowledges—not as a metaphor of expansion or accumulation, but as a way of naming a more dynamic and unruly epistemic force. These reflections are shaped by Adriana Cavarero’s (2021) notion of surging democracy—a vision of political life as generative, relational, and affirmatively conflictual. When transposed into the sphere of gender, science and mathematics, this image allows us to refigure knowledge not as something static or enclosed, but as something alive: dynamic, participatory, joyfully unruly and insistently unpredictable.
This is especially vital when we consider the contributions of the seven women mathematicians across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Their work was never just a matter of producing results or solving problems within pre-established frameworks. It was—and remains—creative engagement, often undertaken under conditions of constraint, and animated by what Hannah Arendt (1998) theorised as the unpredictability of action. Their intellectual efforts, frequently uninvited by formal institutions, nonetheless surged into the public realm, reshaping what Judith Zinsser (2005, 4) has aptly configured as public science—the space in which plurality, visibility, and shared appearance matter.
The notion of agonism, in Arendt’s political vocabulary (1998), which runs as a red thread throughout this project, does not denote hostility but a form of affirmative contestation. Applied to the scientific lives of women mathematicians—Émilie du Châtelet, Maria Gaetana Agnesi, Sophie Germain, Mary Somerville, Ada Lovelace, Sofia Kovalevskaya, and Wang Zhenyi—this concept helps illuminate the relational and world-making force of their work. These were thinkers who did not merely insert themselves into existing epistemic fields, but expanded those fields through imaginative experimentation—through new ways of seeing, framing, and proving.
What emerges is not a single, unified epistemology, but a plural, often contradictory field of inquiry: a space of surging knowledges. This phrase suggests an epistemic force that resists containment, much like the creative unpredictability Arendt associates with action, and which Bonnie Honig describes as the 'unruliness of action, its excess, its resistance to being captured—tamed—by any perspective, interpretation, or story.' (1993, 529) Women mathematicians, often excluded from dominant narratives, defied capture not only institutionally but conceptually.
Their epistemic gestures are not minor footnotes to the history of mathematical sciences; they are part of what allows us to imagine knowledge otherwise. In refusing the terms of exclusion or marginal addition, these women mathematicians enacted what Sandra Harding, in The Science Question in Feminism (1986), has called a rethinking of science from its very foundations. Harding’s challenge to the presumed neutrality and objectivity of scientific inquiry resonates deeply here: rather than simply adding women to an already established canon, she argues for interrogating the cultural, historical, and political conditions under which science itself is produced. The lives and works of these women mathematicians exemplify such a reconfiguration—not only through the content of their contributions but through the modes of inquiry and imagination they brought into the field.
To think of surging knowledges, then, is to think of science not as a neutral accumulation of universal truths, but as an agonistic and imaginative space—one where plural perspectives collide, coexist, and create. These surges are not only acts of intellectual resistance but also affirmative gestures of world-building, echoing Harding’s call for a 'successor science project' (1986, 161) that acknowledges positionality, partiality, and the situated nature of all knowledge. In this light, the contributions of women mathematicians are not ancillary; they are essential to envisioning science as a generative and contingent practice—one that emerges from and sustains plurality.
In reclaiming the legacy of women in mathematics through this lens, we resist the flattening of their contributions into mere archival facts. Instead, we attune ourselves to the rhythms of their thought—rhythms that often exceed the neat timelines of progress or the metrics of recognition. Their knowledges do not merely add to the sum of mathematical sciences; they transform the very ways in which knowledge itself can appear, act, and surge.
References
Arendt, Hannah. 1998 [1958] The Human Condition. Chicago : University of Chicago Press.
Cavarero, Adriana. 2021. Surging Democracy: Notes on Hannah Arendt’s Political Thought. Translated by Matthew Gervase. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Harding, Sandra. 1986. The Science Question in Feminism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Honig, Bonnie. 1993. ‘The Politics of Agonism: A critical response to “beyond good and evil: Arendt, Nietzsche, and the aestheticization of political action” by Dana R. Villa. Political Theory, 21 (3): 528–533.
Zinsser, Judith, P. 2005. ‘Introduction’. In Men, Women and the Birthing of Modern Science’, edited by Judith, P. Zinsser, 3-9, DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press.
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