> 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
David,
I just received as a gift Simon Singh's book FERMAT'S ENIGMA.
Singh, you probably know, produced the NOVA program "The Proof," which,
I think, is considerably better than the book. Anyway, despite the
book's shortcomings, one must commend Singh for including a relatively
long section entitled "Monsieur Le Blanc" (Germain's masculine pen name)
dedicated to Sophie Germain and the unfairness she had to suffer being a
woman mathematician. So, at least in popular literature, some justice
is being done to women in mathematics!
Michael Fried