Abstract

This paper offers the notion of a visual automathography—the self-construction of a scholarly persona in science and mathematics through portraiture—by analysing key representations of Émilie du Châtelet across her life course. While traditional portraiture offers a static image of its subject, a series of portraits provides an alternative approach to temporality, capturing the evolving negotiation of scholarly authority. Through a close reading of Du Châtelet’s portraits, the paper explores how visual markers such as books, mathematical instruments, and gestural cues encoded her identity as a mathematician, scientist and philosopher within the constraints of aristocratic femininity. Drawing on Peircean semiotics, the paper investigates how these portraits function as layered sign systems, where symbolic, indexical, and iconic elements reinforce her intellectual claims. Ultimately, this study argues that Du Châtelet’s visual automathography extended beyond individual portraits, forming a strategic and dynamic self-representation that continues to shape her legacy in the histories of mathematics, science and philosophy.

Abstract

This paper explores Sofia Kovalevskaya’s arduous path to becoming the first woman professor of mathematics in modern Europe. A Russian mathematician (1850–1891), Kovalevskaya earned her doctorate from the University of Göttingen in 1874 under Karl Weierstrass’s private supervision, as the University of Berlin barred women. Yet, it took a decade before she secured her first unsalaried position at Stockholm University in 1884, invited by Gösta Mittag-Leffler, and another five years before attaining tenure in 1889—just after winning the prestigious Bordin Prize. Tracing her protracted struggle for an academic chair, this paper examines her correspondence with Mittag-Leffler from 1880 to early 1891, the year of her untimely death. These letters reveal the daily negotiations, long-term strategies, and entangled demands of research, teaching, and editorial work, alongside the emotional and affective strains of being a widowed single mother in a foreign country. While Kovalevskaya’s achievements are widely celebrated, less attention has been given to her struggles, disillusionments, and despair. Drawing on archival research at the Mittag-Leffler Institute, this study focuses on the shadowed aspects of her career—the ‘dark side of the moon’ in her journey through academia, but it also sheds light on her affirmative take of the world, her poetic spirit and her will to knowledge.

Abstract

Taking Ada Lovelace’s careful orchestration of her own funeral and interment as a point of departure, this paper examines how her memory has been constructed, mediated, and mobilised across time. It introduces the concept of memory machines to trace the layered entanglements of material traces, emotional residues, and institutional practices through which women mathematicians are remembered. Focusing on Lovelace’s meta-archive—understood as a shifting field of documents, silences, and curatorial choices—the paper explores how memory takes shape not only through what is preserved, but through affective attachments and archival infrastructures. Memory machines provide a framework for mapping these operations without reducing them to narrative recovery or linear commemoration. In conclusion, the paper reflects on the broader implications of this approach for the historiography of women in mathematics, suggesting new ways of engaging with archival remains as sites of encounter, interpretation, and imaginative reconstruction.

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

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

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.

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.