March 2025

A Mathematician’s Self in Images: Flows, Intensities, and the Becoming of Thought

How does a woman mathematician narrate her intellectual journey visually? This is one of the questions that I have been exploring recently, very much intrigued by a series of portraits that Émilie du Châtelet commissioned throughout her life. In doing so, I came up with the notion of visual automathography—not a stable, representational account of identity, but a dynamic field where thought, body, and inscription converge in motion.

Images as Assemblages of Mathematical Becoming

Visual automathography does not merely record; it produces. It deterritorializes the mathematician from the fixity of biographical narratives and inscribes her within a plane of intensities. A portrait is not a representation; it is a multiplicity—a condensation of forces that mark her presence within and against the structures of mathematical discourse. The self that emerges is not singular but a shifting assemblage, a machinic phylum of gestures, instruments, inscriptions, and abstractions.

The Visual Field of Mathematics: Surfaces, Diagrams, and Gesture

Mathematics itself operates visually—its symbols, diagrams, and notations are not mere tools but actors in a topology of thought. How, then, does a woman mathematician position herself within this visual field? Does she integrate, disrupt, or reconfigure its logic? The portraits of Du Châtelet, are not static images, but modulations of thought-in-process, mappings of an unfolding epistemic space.

Mathematicians in the Image: Between Capture and Flight

To be imaged is to be captured, yet not all captures are restrictive. The visual automathography of a woman mathematician operates within a paradox: it both inscribes her within the dominant structures of knowledge and opens lines of flight, allowing for new configurations of subjectivity. The hand posed on a book, the chalk poised in mid-air, the unfinished proof on the margin of a portrait—these are sites of resistance, micro-movements of deterritorialization within the stratified landscape of mathematical history.

Towards a Rhizomatic Reading of Mathematical Lives

A visual automathography is not a story with a clear beginning and end; it is a rhizome. It spreads through archives, sketches, diagrams, and annotations, weaving together fragments of a life that resists linearity. By engaging with these images, we move beyond the static contours of biographical discourse and into a terrain where the mathematician’s self is not a fixed entity but an event—a site of perpetual transformation, a becoming-mathematical.

The Image as a Site of Mathematical Becoming

Visual automathography unsettles the idea of a fixed self, revealing the mathematician as an unfolding process. In Du Châtelet’s portraits, thought, body, and medium converge, producing a becoming-mathematical that resists containment. These images do not merely depict but enact, marking both capture and escape. Reading them rhizomatically reveals mathematical lives as assemblages in motion—negotiations between self, discipline, and the materiality of thought.