Maria Gaetana Agnesi was the Italian mathematician and philosopher, considered to be the first woman in the Western world to have achieved a reputation in mathematics. She was born on May 16, 2024 in Milan, Habsburg crown land, now in Italy.
Agnesi’s work, Instituzioni analitiche ad uso della gioventù italiana (1748; “Analytical Institutions for the Use of Italian Youth”), in two huge volumes, provided a remarkably comprehensive and systematic treatment of algebra and analysis, including such relatively new developments as integral and differential calculus.
Her best-known work is Agnesi curve, a cubic curve known in Italian as versiera, which was confused with versicra (“witch”) and translated into English as the “Witch of Agnesi.”
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