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Please reference as: Maria Tamboukou. 2025. 'In the Republic of Mathematics', https://sites.google.com/view/numbersandnarratives/newsletter/2025/june-2025
In the Republic of Mathematics: Affective Lineages and the Inscriptive Force of Love
In the Republic of Mathematics: Affective Lineages and the Inscriptive Force of Love
The idea of a Republic of Mathematics came to me this June, while immersed in Mary Somerville’s autobiography. In the margins of her narrative—threaded through her letters, recollections, and quiet assertions of belonging—I began to sense a different kind of mathematical community. Not one bounded by formal institutions or credentials, but by something subtler and more insistent: affection, admiration, shared pursuit. A republic built, not from sovereignty, but from relation.
This intuition resonated with a longer history. In early modern Europe, mathematicians described themselves as amatores matheseos—lovers of mathematics—and routinely invoked amicitia, friendship, in prefaces, paratexts, and colophons. These were not ornamental flourishes. As historian Richard Oosterhoff (2016) reminds us, such expressions formed a relational infrastructure through which knowledge, authority, and intellectual affiliation were constituted. The sixteenth-century mathematician Oronce Fine called it a Republic of Mathematics: a space in which love itself became a mode of inscription, a way to claim authorship, forge alliances, and become legible within a pedagogical lineage.
My feminist genealogy of automathographies extends and reconfigures this republic. The writings and lives of Émilie Du Châtelet, Maria Gaetana Agnesi, Sophie Germain, Ada Lovelace, Mary Somerville, Sofia Kovalevskaya and Wang Zhenyi trace a counter-lineage, one composed as much from rupture as continuity. They compose not a unified narrative but a constellation of becomings.
These women, too, loved mathematics. But they often did so from its edges: excluded, doubted, or made conditional participants in the very republic they helped sustain. These women, too, loved mathematics. But they often did so from its edges: excluded, doubted, or made conditional participants in the very republic they helped sustain.
Like Fine’s imagined Republic, the automathographies I have studied do not express a stable identity, but rather a shifting assemblage—affective, epistemic, resistant. Here, love of mathematics is not a passport into belonging, but a force of attachment that traverses boundaries and reconfigures legibility. A mode of becoming-with, rather than being.
As I have been tracing this feminist genealogy, I have not simply inserted these voices into a pre-existing story. I have beenre-imagining a different republic—one composed of transversal ties, entangled commitments, and lived intensities. A republic where mathematics is not only written, but inhabited.
References
Oosterhoff, Richard J. 2016. ‘Lovers in Paratexts: Oronce Fine’s Republic of Mathematics.’ Nuncius 31 (3): 549–583, doi: 10.1163/18253911-03103002.
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