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Key words: mathematical imagination, poetical science, rhythm, echo, Ada Lovelace, Sofia Kovalevskaya
Abstract
This paper explores the intricate interplay between mathematics, poetry, and imagination through a close reading of writings by two women mathematicians, Ada Lovelace and Sofia Kovalevskaya. Drawing on Romantic conceptions of the poetic, philosophical accounts of imagination and scientific reverie, and rhythmic and echoic conceptions of subjectivity, the paper argues for a poetics of mathematical thought that resists rigid disciplinary separations. It traces how these women's literary work mobilizes imaginative registers-analogy, reverie, rhythm, echo, dream-not as metaphors for mathematics, but as vital forms of mathematical invention and expression. The result is a rethinking of what it means to ‘do’ mathematics poetically, not in spite of abstraction, but through and with it-through the reverberations, returns, and recursive patterns that echo through both mathematical and poetic form.
Life Writing, on-line first, open access, https://doi.org/10.1080/14484528.2025.2555622
Abstract
This paper reads Mary Somerville’s Personal Recollections as an archive of automathography, tracing her desire to become a mathematician within the constraints of Victorian auto/biography. It argues that mathematics is both the object of Somerville’s desire and the driving force of her retrospective gaze. While shaped by significant editorial interventions, the memoir mobilizes the conventions of life writing to negotiate gendered discourses of knowledge, authority, and intellectual legitimacy. Somerville’s love for mathematics emerges early in her narrative, then recedes into the background—sustained through selective editorial strategies such as the inclusion of letters, social anecdotes, and accounts of intellectual affiliation—before resurfacing with intensity in the final chapters as a site of longing and loss. By reading the Recollections through an automathographic lens, this paper reveals a dynamic rhythm of presence and absence in the telling of Somerville’s mathematical becoming. In doing so, it argues that her memoir does not merely reflect on a life of mathematical passion; it actively founds and sustains her place within the Republic of Mathematics—a domain historically shaped by masculine affiliation but reimagined here through the intimate logic of automathographical desire.
Key words: Mary Somerville, automathographics, mathematics and desire, gender and science, narrative assemblage, republic of mathematics.
The mechanics of the social: Sophie Germain's adventures in microsociology
The mechanics of the social: Sophie Germain's adventures in microsociology
European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology (2025) 12 (1): 81–98, https://doi.org/10.1162/ecps_a_00005, open access
Abstract
This paper traces a genealogical line of microsociology in the theoretical ideas of Sophie Germain, a 19th-century French mathematician and philosopher. While her contributions to mathematics have been rediscovered and re-evaluated in recent years, her theoretical writings remain largely overlooked. To address this gap, I examine Germain's contributions to the history of ideas, with a particular focus on her reflections on the social, political, and cultural issues of her time. I argue that Germain's ideas should be recognised as part of a genealogical tradition of process-oriented approaches to sociology and social theory. In doing so, I make connections between her work and Gabriel Tarde's microsociology.
Key words: mechanics, microsociology, process, science, transdisciplinarity, women mathematicians
Exceptional Women in Science Education? Émilie Du Châtelet and Maria Gaetana Agnesi
Paedagogica Historica: International Journal of the History of Education, 2025, 61 (2): 207-227, doi.10.1080/00309230.2023.2238621, open access
Paedagogica Historica: International Journal of the History of Education, 2025, 61 (2): 207-227, doi.10.1080/00309230.2023.2238621, open access
Abstract
In this paper the author considers the educational experiences and ideas of Émilie Du Châtelet and Maria Gaetana Agnesi, two women mathematicians, scientists and philosophers in eighteenth century Europe. By tracing their historical emergence as subjects of scientific knowledge, as well as creators of philosophy and culture, the author argues that we need to revisit the history of women’s science education and deconstruct the image of ‘the exceptional woman’. In doing so the author proposes the notion of the event as a useful theoretical lens through which we can understand women’s historical constitution as mathematicians, philosophers and scientists.
Key words: exceptionality, event, mathematics, science education, women
Abstract
This paper explores the spatio-temporal rhythms in Sofia Kovalevskaya’s literary writings. Renowned as the first woman professor of mathematics in moder Europe, Kovalevskaya made significant scientific contributions but also excelled in literature, producing novels, poetry, and plays. She believed that great mathematicians must possess “the soul of a poet.” Despite the acclaim her literary work received, most research has focused on her mathematical achievements. As a cosmopolitan figure of her era, Kovalevskaya’s life spanned diverse geographies—born in Russia, studying in Germany, living in Paris, and eventually settling in Sweden as a professor at Stockholm University. These spatial and temporal dimensions deeply influenced her literary narratives. This paper employs narrative rhythmanalysis to trace the flows, forces, and energies within her writings, highlighting the interplay of space, time, and matter in literary creation. Far from offering final conclusions, this approach reveals a dynamic process, continually uncovering new insights into Kovalevskaya’s life, works, and worlds.
Keywords: Echo; literary writings; mathematics; narrative rhythmanalysis; spatio/temporal rhythms
Fragments of Thought: Considering Sophie Germain’s process epistemology
Fragments of Thought: Considering Sophie Germain’s process epistemology
Hypatia, A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, 2025, 40 (2): 350-DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/hyp.2024.45
Key words: feelings, happy ideas, process epistemology, mathematical sciences, transdisciplinarity, women philosophers
Abstract:
In this paper I look at the philosophical work of Sophie Germain, a woman mathematician and philosopher in nineteenth century France. Although forgotten after her death Germain’s contribution to mathematical sciences has been revisited and reappraised in recent years, but with very few notable exceptions, her philosophical work is still in the margins. In addressing this gap in the literature, I revisit Germain’s contribution to the history of ideas, particularly focussing on her contribution to process epistemologies. What I argue is that Germain was a truly transdisciplinary thinker avant la lettre and that her philosophical work should be mapped in the wider field of process philosophies. In doing so I make connections between Sophie Germain and Alfred Whitehead’s philosophy of the organism, particularly focussing on their take on feelings, prehensions, happy ideas and events.
Reading letters of an eighteenth-century femme philosophe: love as an existential and creative force in Émilie Du Châtelet’s correspondence
Women's History Review, open access, 2024, 33 (5), 759-780, open access, https://doi.org/10.1080/09612025.2023.2252224
Abstract
In this article the author considers the letters of Émilie Du Châtelet, an eighteenth-century woman mathematician, philosopher and scientist. The central argument of the paper is that Du Châtelet’s letters leave traces of the process of becoming a femme philosophe, while also throwing light in her involvement in the scientific, philosophical and cultural formations of the early modern period. In this context Du Châtelet’s personal letters carry inscriptions of love as a creative force of life and are tightly intertwined with her ‘laboratory letters’, her correspondence with important mathematicians and scientists of her times. In thus making connections between ‘the personal’ and the ‘scientific’ in Du Châtelet’s correspondence, the paper sketches a feminist critical perspective on a plane of thinking around love as an existential force in its interrelation with mathematics, science and philosophy.
Key words: epistolary intra-actions, laboratory letter, love, scientific correspondences, women mathematicians
© Maria Tamboukou
Abstract:
In this paper, I follow trails of the auto/biographical turn in the field of gender and science, particularly focusing on women mathematicians’ epistolary narratives. The paper emerges from a wider Leverhulme funded project of writing a feminist genealogy of «automathographies», tracing women mathematicians’ historical emergence as subjects of scientific knowledge, as well as creators of philosophy and culture. What I argue is that letters are important auto/biographical documents in illuminating women’s epistemological and intellectual involvement in the making of scientific knowledge, which included the development of mathematical sciences, but was also expanded in the wider cultural formations of the European modernity. In doing so, I deploy the notion of «epistolary sensibility» as a methodological and epistemological approach to archival research with women mathematicians’ letters.
Key words: archives; automathographies; epistolary sensibility; women mathematicians.
Special Issue on Women’s History of Education and the Archival, Digital, Narrative, Auto/biographical, Affective and Spatial Turns
A Princess of Science? Becoming the first Woman Professor in Mathematics in Modern Europe
Nordic Journal of Educational History , Vol. 11 No. 2 (2024), 57-79.Abstract
In this paper I look at the process of becoming the first Woman Professor in Mathematics in Modern Europe by reading the personal and literary writings of Sofia Kovalevskaya. The paper emerges from a wider Leverhulme funded project of writing a feminist genealogy of “automathographies,” tracing women mathematicians’ historical emergence as subjects of scientific knowledge, as well as creators of philosophy and culture. What I argue is that it is essential to throw light onto the social, cultural, and political practices that some women mathematicians deployed in surpassing the restrictions and limitations of their gendered position and excel in the field of mathematical sciences and beyond. In this light, I initiate a process of intense memory work against a wider background within which women mathematicians’ figure as exceptional, albeit marginalized, and largely unknown subjects, and not as active agents, whose scientific, philosophical and literary work has had a huge impact on the cultural formations of modernity and beyond. By highlighting the importance of memory work, as a way of understanding the lasting effects of the past into the present, I trace new paths in the field of gender and science studies to confront women mathematicians’ marginalization within the archive and beyond.
Special Issue: Crossing Borders – Women and Higher Learning in a Nordic Perspective, 1860–1960
Keywords: archive, gender science studies, memory work, women mathematicians
Hidden in the archive of gender and science: The agonistics of knowledge and learning
History of Education, 2024, Vol. 53, no2, 380-402, open access, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0046760X.2024.2304339
Abstract
In this paper the author looks at processes of becoming a woman philosopher and scientist in eighteenth-century Europe, by focussing on educational experiences, discourses and practices revolving around the Italian mathematician, scientist and philosopher, Maria Gaetana Agnesi. The author uses the Arendtian notion of agonism as a lens through which she reads Agnesi’s manuscripts at the Ambrosiana Biblioteca in Milan, by pointing to the non-discursive affects that these documents emanate. By tracing women mathematicians’ historical emergence as subjects of knowledge, as well as creators of philosophy and culture, the author proposes a reconsideration of the history of women’s science education as an agonistic process that has left traces in various archives of gender and science.Key words
Agonism, archival affects, gender and science, mathematics
Feeling Happiness, Feeling Science: Diffractive Readings of Émilie Du Châtelet’s and Sophie Germain’s Philosophical Writings
Journal of the History of Women Philosophers and Scientists, 2023, Vol.2, 68-88
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/2666318X-bja00020
Abstract
In this paper I read diffractively the philosophical writings of Émilie Du Châtelet and Sophie Germain, particularly focusing on their engagement with happiness, both as a theoretical notion and as a lived experience. What I argue is that their take on happiness has nothing to do with the gendered norms and discourses of happiness that they were seen and judged by, in the longue durée of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Their happiness was more in line with the joys and pleasures of knowledge, understanding, living, and creating. While feelings are central in both women’s theorization of happiness, they are deployed along different strands in the philosophical history of emotions and affects, and despite their original and unique contribution, they are still absent from it.
Keywords: happiness; feelings; passions; women mathematicians; philosophers and scientists
‘Ever yours, mathematically’: women’s letters and the mathematical imagination
Gender and Education, open access, 2023, Vol. 35 (8), 742-757 https://doi.org/10.1080/09540253.2023.2265283
Key words: epistolary education; genealogies; imagination; mathematical correspondence; women mathematicians
AbstractIn this paper the author looks at the letters of two renownedwomen mathematicians and scientists of the Victorian period, Mary Somerville and Ada Lovelace, while also considering the imperceptibility of Sophie Germain, an important French mathematician and philosopher in their epistolary exchanges and philosophical writings. Drawing on the importance of mathematical correspondences and epistolary education in thecreation, circulation and dissemination of knowledge, as well as in processes of formal and informal learning, the author arguesthat Lovelace’s and Somerville’s letters leave traces of a remarkable genealogical line of women’s mentorship and personal relations in the nineteenth century world of British mathematics in the backdrop of contradictory discourses around gender, mathematics, and science education
Key words: automathographies, archival figures, creative imagination, Kovalevskaya, meta-archive, traces, women in mathematics
Abstract
In this paper I draw on my research project of writing a feminist genealogy of automathographies, through excavating Sofia Kovalevskaya’s auto/biographical documents. As the first woman to hold a chair in mathematics in modern Europe, but also as a novelist and playwright, Kovaleskaya is a figure that has inspired generations of women mathematicians, as well as feminist and literary scholars around the world. And yet, apart from her autobiography of her early years in Russia her personal diaries, journals and letters have never been translated in their entirety and remain inaccessible to non-Russian speaking scholars. What has emerged instead from the significant body of secondary literature that has evolved around her life and work is a meta-archive of scattered auto/biographical documents with different and often competing translations, fragments of lines, extracts and passages from her letters, diary entries, as well as novels and plays that create palimpsests of traces of the self. In addressing questions arising from working with fragments and traces of the self, I consider the importance of creative imagination in forming entanglements between the researcher and her archival figures. In this light archival research is configured as a process of doing, learning and understanding, an ongoing becoming emerging after layers of documents have been assembled, organized, reordered, read, transcribed, translated and effectively rewritten.
In this paper I draw on my research project of writing a feminist genealogy of automathographies, through excavating Sofia Kovalevskaya’s auto/biographical documents. As the first woman to hold a chair in mathematics in modern Europe, but also as a novelist and playwright, Kovaleskaya is a figure that has inspired generations of women mathematicians, as well as feminist and literary scholars around the world. And yet, apart from her autobiography of her early years in Russia her personal diaries, journals and letters have never been translated in their entirety and remain inaccessible to non-Russian speaking scholars. What has emerged instead from the significant body of secondary literature that has evolved around her life and work is a meta-archive of scattered auto/biographical documents with different and often competing translations, fragments of lines, extracts and passages from her letters, diary entries, as well as novels and plays that create palimpsests of traces of the self. In addressing questions arising from working with fragments and traces of the self, I consider the importance of creative imagination in forming entanglements between the researcher and her archival figures. In this light archival research is configured as a process of doing, learning and understanding, an ongoing becoming emerging after layers of documents have been assembled, organized, reordered, read, transcribed, translated and effectively rewritten.
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