Hidden figures: giving history's most overlooked mathematicians their due

https://www.theguardian.com/books/article/2024/jul/29/secret-lives-numbers-history-mathematicians-overlooked

Hidden figures: giving history’s most overlooked mathematicians their due

A new book looks at the contributions made by women and people of colour, whose stories have often been forgotten

David Smith in Washington
Mon 29 Jul 2024 14.22 EDT

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Kitagawa and Revell came up with the idea of a history over a cup of tea at a bookshop in Charing Cross, London. They thought it would be straightforward but it was anything but. They found the origin of ideas to be as beautiful, varied and elusive as the most elegant of mathematical problems.

The authors write: “As we worked our way through thousands of years of mathematics, almost everything we thought we knew was challenged in one way or another. Some well-known stories ended up being misrepresentations and others complete fabrications. Many mathematicians and mathematics have wrongly been excluded from history.”

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When Kowalevski was 18, she entered into a “white marriage” (a marriage of convenience) so she could escape her father’s control to move abroad and study maths. At first he would not agree to the union but, “inspired by Dostoevsky’s novels, she made a scene”, locking herself in her future husband’s apartment until her father agreed.
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The book also tells the stories of China’s Ban Zhao, one of the earliest known female mathematicians who taught maths and astronomy to Empress Deng Sui, and Euphemia Lofton Haynes, who became the first Black woman to obtain a PhD in mathematics and fought systemic racism in education.

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