> 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 toGerhard 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.
I looked up the same names in Eves' and Kline's books (Katz's book is not
available at the moment). Only Agnesi and Hypatia are mentioned by Eves;
Kline has also Germain and Kowalevskaya (judging by the indices).
G.Kowalevsky is not mentioned by Boyer for any mathematical contribution,
but only as a historical source. The same goes for Max Noether. There are
two possible schools of thought about mentioning women mathematicians in
books and courses on history of math. One is to emphasize their
existence, given the unfortunate fact that many people (of both genders,
and I know at least one mathematician of such views)
still think that mathematics is not a woman's area. Another is to mention
people only by the importance of their contribution. It is possible that
Boyer took the course suggested by the latter way of thinking. Most of the
women mentioned made interesting and significant contributions, so did
many other mathematicians that are not mentioned in the above books, and
it would be very difficult to guess how Boyer, or Eves, or any other
author, decided who to include or omit. In saying "most" above I had two
exceptions in mind. One is Hypatia, about whose mathematics we know very
little, and in particular we don't know about any innovation by her, so
I'm not surprised that more space is given to her death than to her
science. The other is Emmy Noether, whose ommision seems really
scandalous. But in looking hurriedly through Boyer's last chapter, titled
"aspects of the 20th century", I noted that in algebra, he goes straight
from the end of the 19th century to Cartan-Eilenberg's book on
homomological algebra at 1948. No mention is made of the development of
abstract algebra in the first half of this century. Steinitz and the
theory of fields are not mentioned, nor is Frobenius and representation
theory, etc.
>
> 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
>
As for K.D.Michalowitz' letter, the names she mentions from the MAA list
seem to me biased toward Americans of this century.
Avinoam Mann