Free Essay on Maria Gaetana Agnesi
Maria Gaetana Agnesi (1718-1799)
“... Belonged to a class intermediate between the patricians and the merely rich. Such a bourgeois could have a household fit for a lord, comport himself like a knight, mingle freely with some nobles, occupy himself with the finer things of life, be a patron of men of talent. [Pietro Agnesi] did just that...” spoken by a proud father. Her father was a nobleman and work at the University of Bologna as a professor. Maria was born in Italy on May 16, 1718 to a wealthy and literate family. She was the oldest of twenty-one children. Growing up with all the money in the world did not satisfy Maria’s life. So she started practicing math an actually enjoyed it at a young age. Her father saw her talents in the subject and started paying tutors to teach her French, Greek, Hebrew, and Spanish.
By the age of thirteen Maria had already began to debate in the different languages with her father’s foreign guest. Because she was being forced to debate because of her father she did not like this task very much and always tried to get out of it but wasn’t able to until she was twenty-one. She got married two times before her mother died of an unknown cause. Now becoming the oldest of twenty-one she began to take over the management of the house hold decided not to get married again.
Maria still had a passion for mathematics. The first piece of literature she wrote was Propositiones Philosophicae is was published in 1738 and was a composition of the collection of essays from the gatherings that her father’s friends and her had at the meeting that she had to attend. Maria is also known from the curve called the "Witch of Agnesi". This formula was written to show the equations for curves: y = a*sqrt (a*x-x*x)/x because she thought the “x” and “y” axis was supposed to be vertical and horizontal. Today we use x horizontal and y vertical, so that regular form of the curve is given by the Cartesian equation y*x^2=a^2(a-y) or y = a^3/(x^2 + a^2) because it is a versed sine curve, originally studied by Fermat. Pierre Fermat was a lawyer and a government official with a snitch for mathematics.
However, Maria's text was translated into English the word “versiera” was confused with the...