From ancient Greece to medieval Baghdad, from Revolutionary France to China’s Qing Dynasty, women mathematicians have worked alongside men to a degree that was denied them in most other fields of scientific inquiry. Locked out of biological studies first by restrictions on their freedom of travel and later because of concerns that they would be corrupted by evolutionary thought, effectively barred from experimental physics for centuries through lack of access to specialized equipment, and inconsistently permitted a medical education, women have, for three thousand years and more, been a steady presence during every great mathematical era.
They have contributed to the fundamentals of geometry and the expansion of algebra from the earliest days of those disciplines, and stepped in, on multiple occasions, to save the mathematical traditions of their home countries from death by ossification. They have guided us through the twisted realms of non-Euclidean space, gifted us the mathematical models we need to understand the behavior of the metals of our buildings and the soils we construct them upon, and given us an at times chilling view into the fates of super-massive systems over deep time.
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