[HM] Sophie Germain & Carl Boyer

David Fowler (david.fowler@warwick.ac.uk)
Sat, 7 Nov 1998 08:02:12 +0000

I've just listened to a poignant play about Sophie Germain on the radio,
and when my wife wanted to know more about her, I looked her up in Boyer's
_History of Mathematics_ and found that she's not there! She's certainly
not in the index, and I couldn't find her in a quick skim through the text.
And then I moved on: Sonja Kovalevskaya isn't in the index either, although
there are 3 references to Gerhard K;, author of a book published in 1910.
Nor Maria Agnesi. Nor Ada Lovelace. Nor Emmy Noether, though her father Max
is there. Charlotte Scott gets in, though not in the text itself; only in a
footnote reference to an article by her. Hypatia gets 7 lines, 4 of them on
her death. At that point I gave up.

Is this, how shall I call it, blind spot well known? It confirmed my wife's
worst feelings about mathematicians and their historians.

I have the 1968 edition; I presume that some of these are in the 2nd
edition revised by Uta Merzbach, (1989) but the bibliography I looked at
says of it: "Updates the bibliographies and augments the twentieth-century
section of the 1st en of 1968. A reliable introduction", so it's not
guaranteed!

David Fowler