Women mathematicians: a long-ignored history

Now, if you were asked to name some women mathematicians, and what is more, ones from before 1925, you might think—if you take an interest in the history of the discipline—of Émilie du Châtelet, Sophie Germain, Hypatia, Emmy Noether, or Sofia Kovalevskaya. And that would already be no small thing.

For very few names of women mathematicians are known to the general public. And this tends to make us believe that only a handful of women exist in the history of mathematics. Yet this is false: they are more numerous than we imagine, and many remain unknown.

Have you ever heard the names, in no particular order, of al-ʻIjlīyah, Lubna of Cordoba, Laura Bassi, Maria Gaetana Agnesi, Laura Pisati, Élisabeth Ferrand, Nicole Reine Lepaute, Marie Louise du Piéry, Marie Jeanne Lefrançois, Marie Charlotte of Gotha, Angélique Delisle, Victorine de Chastenay, Edmée Chandon, Maria Tehoari, Rose Bonnet, Liouba Bortniker, Madeleine Chaumont, Mary Somerville, Mary Everest Boole, Hilda Phoebe Hudson, Ruth Gentry, Frances Hardcastle, Virginia Ragsdale, Emilie Martin, Anna Johnson, Charlotte Angas Scott, Philippa Fawcett, Grace Chisholm Young, or Alicia Boole Stott? And the list is very far from exhaustive.

Nevertheless, far from wanting to compile a catalogue of women mathematicians, this issue invites you to delve into the historical dynamics, the sociological obstacles, the institutional forms of recognition, the various types of careers pursued, but also the mechanisms of forgetting and erasure, and the struggles to conquer this field—mathematics—long regarded as exclusively male.

You will thus travel to France, England, Germany, Italy, and the United States, but also to ancient Greece or the medieval Arab-Muslim world, discovering these women mathematicians whose names and work deserve far more than complacent indifference. And perhaps you will come to see the history of mathematics in a different light…

Better than a surname, a first name?

While mathematicians are generally referred to by their surname (Euler, Laplace, Riemann…), even at the risk of no longer being quite sure of their first name (what were Ramanujan's and D'Alembert's first names, again?), women mathematicians, by contrast, tend to be referred to by both their first name and surname. We do not speak of Germain but of Sophie Germain. And if we want to shorten it, we will often say "Sophie". This reflects a difference in treatment between men and women, no doubt partly out of a form of gallantry (using only a woman's surname is considered somewhat blunt), but nothing requires us to follow this convention. In this issue, then, you will find several different strategies for naming them, depending on the authors of each article, whom we have left free to follow their own practice.