Évariste Galois, 1811–1832. By Laura Toti Rigatelli (original) (raw)

"Was Sophie Germain Revolutionary? Reexamining the Education of An Early Female Mathematician"

Sophie Germain (1776-1831) was a prize-winning female mathematician who earned the friendship and well-deserved respect of contemporary leading mathematicians including Joseph-Louis Lagrange and Carl Friedrich Gauss. Within the history of science, however, she is remembered chiefly as a recluse and as a female anomaly in an otherwise male scientific tradition. Through her career, this paper examines late eighteenth-century female education in the sciences and the treatment accorded women who sought access to the leading scientific communities of Revolutionary and Napoleonic France. The Revolution ushered in a brief and exciting era of openness for female participation in the public sphere between 1789-1793. Philosophers like the Marquis de Condorcet (himself a mathematician) were strenuous advocates of women’s right to an equal education in the early 1790s, including advanced instruction in the sciences. Nonetheless Germain, then a young girl from a wealthy middle-class Parisian family, received only the most haphazard of educations. Her early years were spent studying mathematics covertly at night, against her parents’ objections. In 1794, a year after women were banned from all public and political activities, the Ecole Polytechnique opened in Paris as a national training ground for scientists and mathematicians. Unsurprisingly, it only admitted male students. Germain bypassed this restriction by assuming a male identity in order to advance her education at the school. The brilliant Lagrange, who was in charge of the mathematics course, eventually uncovered Germain’s deception. He became the first in a series of important mentors to supervise her mathematical education, ultimately culminating in her correspondence with Gauss. This led to her enduring contribution to mathematics: a breakthrough solution of many cases of Fermat’s Last Theorem. Throughout her life, Germain disdained “female” education and avoided all association with other scientific women. Instead she chose to follow a strictly male path in her education and scholarly pursuits, finding mentoring and validation exclusively from male authorities. Given the existence of at least several successful eighteenth-century women scientists who might have provided female role models for Germain, this paper asks whether such women amounted to a female scientific tradition, whether it was well enough known for Germain to have followed it, why she chose not to avail herself of it, and how that decision may have influenced her career.

Sophie Germain: The Poet-Mathematician Series, Part IV

Executive Intelligence Review, 2018

Conclusion of Poet-Mathematician Series. Five key students of Gauss's {Disquisitiones Arithmeticae} examined for the musical core of their mathematical work, and for the tempering process of their morality in having to confront Cauchy et al - that is, Dirichlet, Abel, Galois, Riemann and Germain. Gauss's 'classical' approach of Plato and Kepler, whereby the fruitful and miraculous coherence of the 'subjective' mind and the 'objective' created world is at work. Sophie Germain's study of Gauss's modalities key to her 'prix extraordinaire' work on the harmonics of Chladni's plates.

Alexandre Grothendieck: Mathematical Genius & Political Radical

The 86 year old man who has just died in an obscure hospital in South Western France had been living as a recluse in the village of Larresse for over 20 years. Few of his neighbours realized that the bald and increasingly fragile bearded figure who so pathologically shunned normal human intercourse was an intellectual titan who had done more than anyone else in the 1

Lost Causes: Walter Scott and Adolphe Quetelet's Revolutions

Configurations 27.1, 2019

Nineteenth-century mathematicians and novelists shared a pressing question: how might the events preceding revolution be related? This essay outlines a timeline of this question from the novels of Walter Scott, to the mathematical projects of Adolphe Quetelet. Drawing on mathematical history, I show how Pierre Simon Laplace and Nicolas Condorcet preceded Quetelet in searching for a metaphor adequate to the application of probability mathematics to history. I argue that Scott’s bridge between private and public spheres—a wavering hero—circulated exactly such a metaphor, priming the public imagination for Quetelet’s homme moyen (average man), the statistical figure enabling mathematical analysis of social data. Comparing mathematical representational strategies with those of Walter Scott’s historical novels, I argue that while many mathematicians saw probability logic as the exclusive language for encoding uncertainty, Scott reads probability logic as one predictive language among many: historically contingent, subject to change, and unpredictably predictive.

The history of John Galt : past and present in the wake of the Enlightenment

2003

Cataloged from PDF version of article.The placing of the history of Enlightenment ideas and their implications in a wider social context has been an important characteristic of Enlightenment studies for some time. This thesis offers John Galt, the early nineteenth-century Scottish historical novelist, as an example of this wider reception of the Enlightenment. It investigates his novels and gives an account of Galt’s attitudes to the ideas of his times, on the historical, socio-political and other matters. It returns the novels to their immediate Scottish intellectual and cultural contexts, speaking of Galt’s Greenock, contemporary Scottish literary circles and London politics, all of which played important parts in Galt’s formation. His works are interesting in showing a belief in the expediency of reason, learning and the possibility of human progress within an organic society and history, placing an emphasis on Divine Providential as the ground of a universal system. Galt support...

Cinema scientists: a film about Galois

Lettera Matematica, 2018

Professor of theoretical physics Giuseppe Mussardo has added a film about the life and work of mathematician Évariste Galois to his series of films about scientists. Here we briefly mention Mussardo and his films, discuss the ways in which the film meaningfully communicates both biography and science, recount Galois's short life and tragic death, and show why his brilliant mathematical ideas have outlived him.

The Self Under Siege: Galdós and the Search for Certainty

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