Maria Agnesi: Calculus Pioneer and Charity Leader

Gabrielle Birchak/ April 8, 2026/ Enlightenment/ 0 comments

The “Witch of Agne­si” is one of the most mis­lead­ing labels in the his­to­ry of math­e­mat­ics. Wel­come to Math! Sci­ence! His­to­ry! I’m Gabrielle Bir­chak, and to close out Women’s His­to­ry Month, I’m telling the sto­ry of Maria Gae­tana Agne­si, the woman behind that infa­mous nick­name. There was no witch­craft, no scan­dal, and no dark leg­end. Instead, there was a bril­liant mind that helped make advanced math­e­mat­ics teach­able, then spent decades car­ing for the sick and unfor­tu­nate, giv­ing away her for­tune and choos­ing a qui­et ending.

Milan and its intellect on display

Milan in the ear­ly eigh­teenth cen­tu­ry was a city where sta­tus could be curat­ed like a gallery, and wealthy fam­i­lies used cul­ture, lan­guage, and learn­ing as proof that they belonged among the elite. Smith­son­ian Mag­a­zine notes that Maria Gae­tana Agne­si grew up as the eldest child of Pietro Agne­si, a wealthy Milanese silk mer­chant who host­ed salons in the fam­i­ly palaz­zo as part of a delib­er­ate climb in social stand­ing.[1]

Those salons were not just par­ties with exquis­ite appe­tiz­ers and intel­lec­tu­al elites. They were staged per­for­mances of refine­ment where guests watched young prodi­gies dis­play skill in music, lan­guages, and argu­ment, the way oth­er house­holds dis­played art. Pietro Agne­si show­cased Maria Gae­tana and her sis­ter, Maria Tere­sa, to vis­i­tors at these gath­er­ings, turn­ing intel­lect into a kind of social cur­ren­cy.[2]

Agnesi’s abil­i­ties made her an aston­ish­ing cen­ter­piece for that world, and they showed up ear­ly. A detailed bio­graph­i­cal pro­file host­ed by Oxford Math­e­mat­ics reports that she became famous as “ora­co­lo set­telingue,” a “mir­a­cle in sev­en lan­guages,” reflect­ing the breadth of lan­guages she learned as a child. 

This is the part of her sto­ry that often gets told like a whole­some mon­tage. Still, the salon set­ting mat­tered because it explained a ten­sion that fol­lowed her for years. His­to­ri­an Paula Find­len argues that Agne­si was shaped by her father’s ambi­tion and by the social machin­ery that turned a learned daugh­ter into a sym­bol of fam­i­ly advance­ment, even as she became a seri­ous thinker in her own right.[3]

If you zoom out, the salon was a door­way and a cage at the same time. It gave Agne­si access to tutors, books, and intel­lec­tu­al net­works. Still, it also placed her under a spot­light she did not ful­ly con­trol, where her learn­ing could be admired. At the same time, her choic­es were still con­strained by expec­ta­tions about women’s roles. The Vat­i­can-relat­ed out­let L’Osservatore Romano even empha­sizes that Agne­si did not enjoy salon life in the way her father did, high­light­ing her dis­tance from the social ambi­tions wrapped around her pub­lic image. She did not want a life of social ambi­tion nor one of acad­e­mia. She had begged her father to spare her a life of mar­riage and a life of fit­ting in with the soci­etal norms. Instead, she want­ed to live in a con­vent and serve the impov­er­ished. Her father, how­ev­er, refused to let her live the life she chose. In the span of his­to­ry and across the world, women have had that lux­u­ry for only a lit­tle over a cen­tu­ry; some have not at all. And even today, we are expect­ed to exist under the con­straints of fam­i­ly and soci­etal expec­ta­tions.[4] 

So, Agne­si was not sim­ply known as a bril­liant young lady. Still, rather, as Find­len notes, “she was bril­liant inside a sys­tem that treat­ed bril­liance as a fam­i­ly asset.” Findlen’s his­to­ri­og­ra­phy frames Agne­si as one of the best-known learned women of her gen­er­a­tion, but also as some­one whose lega­cy is easy to mis­un­der­stand if you ignore the social forces that put her on stage.[5]

That said, how does some­one raised in a cul­ture of learned per­for­mance decide to pro­duce real schol­ar­ship, on her own terms, in a world that prais­es women’s intel­lect while still polic­ing their lives? Much to her dis­like, Agne­si was liv­ing inside a pub­lic wrap­per of salon per­for­mances as an intel­lect under duress. Still, despite that, she took on a pri­vate seri­ous­ness that set her up to become a major math­e­mat­i­cal genius. So, even though she was under con­straint, she was still able to use her exten­sive knowl­edge for the ben­e­fit of math­e­mat­ics.[6]

By the time she was thir­ty years old, she was no longer just per­form­ing clev­er­ness for a room. She was doing some­thing far more last­ing. She wrote math­e­mat­ics in a way that made it teach­able. That shift moved her from being admired to being unig­nor­able. In 1748, she wrote a two-vol­ume work on alge­bra and cal­cu­lus, titled Insti­tuzioni analitiche ad uso del­la gioven­tù ital­iana (Ana­lyt­i­cal Insti­tu­tions for the Use of Ital­ian Youth), which was cen­tral to her rep­u­ta­tion as a female math­e­mati­cian.[7]

Agnesi’s Mathematical Legacy

Agnesi’s real math­e­mat­i­cal lega­cy is not a sin­gle curve. Her lega­cy is a teach­ing project built at full scale that orga­nizes a chaot­ic fron­tier of math in order to feel learn­able to a human mind. In 1748, she pub­lished Insti­tuzioni analitiche ad uso del­la gioven­tù ital­iana. This two-vol­ume work in Eng­lish is titled Ana­lyt­i­cal insti­tu­tions for use by Ital­ian youth. It is remark­ably com­pre­hen­sive and sys­tem­at­ic, cov­er­ing alge­bra and “analy­sis,” includ­ing inte­gral and dif­fer­en­tial cal­cu­lus, which was new at that time.[8]

The Math­e­mat­i­cal Asso­ci­a­tion of America’s his­tor­i­cal note makes the point blunt­ly. This book was writ­ten as a teach­ing text. It was praised for “syn­the­siz­ing and clar­i­fy­ing” the work of oth­ers in cal­cu­lus, mean­ing Agne­si is act­ing less like a lone inven­tor and more like a bril­liant trans­la­tor between experts and stu­dents.[9]

Agnesi’s title, “for the youth of Italy,” is not dec­o­ra­tive because she is telling you her goal right on the label, which is that the book is a com­pre­hen­sive text of alge­bra and cal­cu­lus writ­ten in the ver­nac­u­lar and meant to be usable.[10]

This is also where her men­tors and col­lab­o­ra­tors mat­ter, because the book did not emerge from a vac­u­um. In His­to­ri­an Clara Sil­via Roero’s arti­cle, she doc­u­ments an intense cor­re­spon­dence (1745–1752) between Agne­si, her teacher Ramiro Rampinel­li, and the Ric­cati fam­i­ly, includ­ing Jacopo Ric­cati and his sons, cen­tered on the writ­ing, com­po­si­tion, and print­ing of the Insti­tuzioni.[11]

Agnesi’s pri­ma­ry teacher, Rampinel­li, was con­sid­ered an out­stand­ing math­e­mati­cian and teacher. Amid the expec­ta­tions she endured, she con­sid­ered Rampinel­li one of her great­est men­tors. In the pref­ace of her book, she pays trib­ute to Rampinelli’s help. She describes how he pro­vid­ed her with math­e­mat­i­cal clar­i­ty. He was her great­est sup­port­er and encour­aged her to write her teach­ing guide on dif­fer­en­tial cal­cu­lus. Agne­si writes, “I should have become alto­geth­er entan­gled in the great labyrinth of insu­per­a­ble dif­fi­cul­ty… to him I owe all advances that my small tal­ent has suf­ficed to make.”[12]

Jacopo Ric­cati enters the sto­ry not as a foot­note but as part of the tech­ni­cal and edi­to­r­i­al ecosys­tem around the book, and Pro­fes­sor Roero’s recent ana­lyt­i­cal study treats the Ric­cati fam­i­ly as active par­tic­i­pants in the sci­en­tif­ic dia­logue shap­ing the text as it was being pre­pared for pub­li­ca­tion. Agne­si also makes a very strate­gic ded­i­ca­tion, ded­i­cat­ing the Insti­tuzioni to Empress Maria There­sa, and mul­ti­ple col­lec­tion notes dis­cuss this ded­i­ca­tion as both a patron­age move and a state­ment about women oper­at­ing in a male-dom­i­nat­ed intel­lec­tu­al world.[13] Even the way mod­ern libraries sum­ma­rize it makes the point that this ded­i­ca­tion is not ran­dom, not­ing that she ded­i­cat­ed the book to Maria There­sa and frames the ded­i­ca­tion in the con­text of Enlight­en­ment-era reforms and cul­tur­al pol­i­tics.[14]

As for her con­tri­bu­tion to the “witch’s curve,” it was not one famous curve. Her con­cept took a sprawl­ing set of ideas, orga­nized them, and wrote them in a way that made analy­sis feel teach­able, step­wise, and coher­ent to students.

Now, for my math nerds, this is the moment we talk about what “analy­sis” meant in prac­tice, because a huge amount of eigh­teenth-cen­tu­ry analy­ses is the sci­ence of curves.[15]

When we study curves in this era, we are ask­ing ques­tions that sound sim­ple but turn out to be pow­er­ful: what is the curve’s equa­tion, where does it peak, where does it change con­cav­i­ty, what tan­gent line kiss­es it at a giv­en point, and what area sits beneath it. In mod­ern lan­guage, we are learn­ing to treat a curve as the graph of a func­tion, and then using deriv­a­tives to mea­sure local behav­ior and inte­grals to mea­sure accu­mu­lat­ed behav­ior, which is why a “text­book of analy­sis” is also a prac­ti­cal hand­book for under­stand­ing change.

Here is one anchor, before I get into for­mu­las. A curve is not just a draw­ing, because in analy­sis, a curve is a rule that pairs an input with an out­put, and the graph is the vis­i­ble trace of that rule.

Once you have that rule, cal­cu­lus gives you two super­pow­ers: the deriv­a­tive tells you how steep the curve is at a point, and the inte­gral tells you how much total “stuff” piles up under the curve across an inter­val. For Agnes­si, she was not pro­vid­ing ground­break­ing infor­ma­tion. It had been stud­ied ear­li­er by Fer­mat and Gui­do Gran­di. And this mat­ters because she was not claim­ing it from noth­ing; she was doing what no oth­er math­e­mati­cian had done before: teach­ing it.

In a clean, mod­ern form, one com­mon scal­ing of the Agne­si curve is

y=\frac{a^3}{x^2+a^2}

which you can view as a tall cen­tral hump that falls off toward zero as |x| grows.

Now the deriv­a­tive is where the curve starts talking.

Dif­fer­en­ti­ate and you get

\frac{dy}{dx}=-\frac{2a^3x}{{(x^2+a^2})^2} 

which imme­di­ate­ly tells you the slope is zero at x=0, pos­i­tive for x<0, and neg­a­tive for x>0, so the curve ris­es to a sin­gle peak and then falls.

That one line is the cal­cu­lus ver­sion of “this curve has one sum­mit,” and it is exact­ly the kind of thing a stu­dent can learn to do again and again with dif­fer­ent fam­i­lies of curves.

You can push it one step fur­ther and ask about con­cav­i­ty, because con­cav­i­ty is the dif­fer­ence between a hill that rounds gen­tly and a hill that sud­den­ly “tight­ens” as you move away from the center.

If you com­pute the sec­ond deriv­a­tive, you can locate inflec­tion behav­ior. The Wikipedia sum­ma­ry of the curve’s prop­er­ties points to the exis­tence of inflec­tion points in stan­dard scal­ings, which is the qual­i­ta­tive geom­e­try stu­dents are train­ing their intu­ition to see.

Then there is the inte­gral, which is where the curve becomes a mea­sur­ing instrument.

The total area under 

y=\frac{a^3}{x^2+a^2}

across all real x is

\int_{-\infty}^{\infty}\frac{a^3}{x^2+a^2}\ dx=\pi a^2

which is a gor­geous result because the answer is not some messy expres­sion, it is a clean con­stant times a².

This is also one rea­son the curve appears lat­er in prob­a­bil­i­ty and physics con­texts: the same func­tion­al shape is tied to the arc­t­an­gent deriv­a­tive and the Cauchy dis­tri­b­u­tion in com­mon normalizations.

So, back to her writ­ing, Agnesi’s deep­er con­tri­bu­tion here is not that she found a deriv­a­tive nobody could find; instead, she helped make the math­e­mat­ics leg­i­ble, repeat­able, and teach­able to stu­dents who were not already liv­ing inside the math­e­mati­cians’ pri­vate cor­re­spon­dence net­works or attend­ing the salon gath­er­ings.[16]  

And that returns us to why the Rampinel­li and Ric­cati con­nec­tions mat­ter, because the archival record shows her book, Ana­lyt­i­cal Insti­tu­tions for the Use of Ital­ian Youth, being shaped through teach­ing, cor­re­spon­dence, and revi­sion, not mere­ly through soli­tary inspi­ra­tion.[17]

Agne­si took the math­e­mat­ics of curves and turned it into a cur­ricu­lum, which is one of the most ben­e­fi­cial forms of influ­ence a math­e­mati­cian can have.

The Witches Curve

When Agne­si wrote about curves, she wrote in the lan­guage of her century’s cut­ting edge, because in the 1700s, “analy­sis” was large­ly the art of turn­ing geom­e­try into cal­cu­la­tion and cal­cu­la­tion back into geom­e­try. For a lis­ten­er, a curve can sound like a doo­dle, but for eigh­teenth-cen­tu­ry math­e­mati­cians, a curve is a dis­ci­plined object: it has an equa­tion, it has a shape, and that shape con­tains mea­sur­able facts such as max­i­ma, tan­gents, inflec­tion points, and areas.

That is why curves mat­tered so much, because once you can express a curve alge­braical­ly, you can dif­fer­en­ti­ate it to under­stand local behav­ior, and you can inte­grate it to under­stand total accu­mu­la­tion, which is the toolk­it that ends up pow­er­ing physics, astron­o­my, and engineering.

The curve that lat­er gets tied to her name is often pre­sent­ed as a kind of celebri­ty curve. Still, it is bet­ter under­stood as a teach­ing exam­ple inside a much larg­er project of mak­ing analy­sis coher­ent for students.

Intu­itive­ly, the “Witch of Agne­si” curve has a sin­gle smooth peak and then falls away toward the x‑axis on both sides, which makes it per­fect for show­ing stu­dents how to locate max­i­ma, study con­cav­i­ty, and think about asymp­totes with­out need­ing a com­pli­cat­ed func­tion. If you want a clean men­tal pic­ture, imag­ine a hill that ris­es to one round­ed sum­mit and then slow­ly flat­tens out into long, low tails, rather than drop­ping off like a cliff.

Now, the nick­name is the part peo­ple remem­ber, and it is the least impor­tant part of her life. The Math­e­mat­i­cal Asso­ci­a­tion of Amer­i­ca notes that Agne­si called the curve “la ver­siera,” and that the Eng­lish trans­la­tor John Col­son ren­dered it as “witch,” and the name stuck in the anglo­phone world.[18] [19]

Wikipedia’s ety­mol­o­gy sec­tion gives the core mech­a­nism: “ver­siera” is tied to old­er Latin and trigono­met­ric ter­mi­nol­o­gy, but it also sits close enough to words used for “the adver­sary,” which is why Colson’s trans­la­tion drift­ed into “witch,” cre­at­ing a label that sounds like folk­lore when it is real­ly lin­guis­tic sta­t­ic.[20]

So for this pod­cast, I’m using the nick­name only as a sign­post for lis­ten­ers who have heard it before. Then I am going to put it back on the shelf where it belongs, because Agnesi’s sto­ry is not a spooky anec­dote; it is a sto­ry about teach­ing, rep­u­ta­tion, and what gets remem­bered. Her work makes her impos­si­ble to ignore, and then comes Bologna.

Bologna: Her appointment and prestige

You see, in 1750, Agne­si was appoint­ed by Pope Bene­dict XIV to the chair of math­e­mat­ics and nat­ur­al phi­los­o­phy at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Bologna, and yet she nev­er actu­al­ly took up the post in the every­day sense we imag­ine when we hear “pro­fes­sor,” or in her case, “pro­fes­sores­sa.”

It is inter­est­ing because she nev­er trav­eled to Bologna to accept and serve in the role, even though the appoint­ment itself was real and pub­lic.[21] This appoint­ment by the pope was part of her broad­er pub­lic rep­u­ta­tion, and it empha­sized the appoint­ment while also not­ing she nev­er filled the post, which is exact­ly the ten­sion you want to explore rather than smooth over.

The deep­er sto­ry here is about patron­age and pres­tige, because Pope Bene­dict XIV was also known for sup­port­ing learned cul­ture and bol­ster­ing Bologna’s intel­lec­tu­al stand­ing. By ele­vat­ing a famous schol­ar, he was cre­at­ing a pub­lic sig­nal about what kind of insti­tu­tion Bologna intend­ed to be.

That inter­pre­ta­tion is strength­ened by the archival-based schol­ar­ship sum­ma­rized in a review by Mas­si­mo Maz­zot­ti, which explains that she was pro­claimed an hon­orary lec­turer­by Bologna’s sen­ate on Octo­ber 5, 1750. This phras­ing points toward hon­orif­ic recog­ni­tion more than a mod­ern employ­ment con­tract with manda­to­ry week­ly lec­tures.[22]

In oth­er words, the appoint­ment can be read as Bologna and the papa­cy say­ing, “This schol­ar­ship counts, this author mat­ters, and our intel­lec­tu­al life is not provin­cial,” even if Agnesi’s actu­al dai­ly life remained anchored in Milan by fam­i­ly oblig­a­tions, health, and the direc­tion her val­ues were pulling her. And what is so very cool about this hon­orary appoint­ment she didn’t fill is that, after this, her life didn’t shrink; it expand­ed. It broad­ened her life view, giv­ing her the momen­tum to pivot.

Agnesi’s second life

His­to­ry has a ruth­less com­pres­sion algo­rithm, because it keeps the catchy label and dis­cards the slow labor that actu­al­ly shaped lives. The curve nick­name sur­vived because it is sticky. Still, the real achieve­ment is that Agne­si wrote a teach­ing mas­ter­piece that orga­nized cal­cu­lus-era analy­sis for learn­ers, and then spent decades direct­ing care for peo­ple soci­ety pre­ferred not to see.

If you only know Agne­si from a curve nick­name, you miss the fact that she spent decades build­ing some­thing as demand­ing as any book: a life orga­nized around care for peo­ple who had very lit­tle pro­tec­tion. She had a major piv­ot after her father’s death. She devot­ed her­self to the­ol­o­gy and char­i­ta­ble work, and that was the start of what would become the dom­i­nant chap­ter of her life.

This is where the sto­ry stops being “a bril­liant woman who did math” and becomes “a bril­liant woman who chose a dif­fer­ent kind of rig­or.” Agne­si chose altru­ism. Because run­ning care for the sick and the poor is an admin­is­tra­tive, emo­tion­al, and logis­ti­cal grind that does not reward you with applause.[23]

In 1771, she took on a for­mal lead­er­ship role at Milan’s Pio Alber­go Trivulzio, which is a hos­pi­tal and retire­ment home for the under­priv­i­leged, and was invit­ed to pre­side there as Pri­o­ra for the women’s ward, which in Eng­lish means she was the direc­tor for the women’s ward, in an insti­tu­tion serv­ing the most des­ti­tute patients.[24]

Mul­ti­ple mod­ern his­tor­i­cal sum­maries con­verge on the same stark out­come: she gave away sub­stan­tial resources, lived sim­ply, and died in 1799, which makes her life less of an “eccen­tric genius” and more of a human with a sus­tained self­less com­mit­ment to the unfortunate.”

In her lat­er years, Agnesi’s work shift­ed from the abstract clar­i­ty of math­e­mat­ics to the dai­ly, grind­ing clar­i­ty of care. She took on real respon­si­bil­i­ty for women who were sick and poor, not as a sym­bol­ic patroness but as some­one involved in the admin­is­tra­tion and human real­i­ty of suf­fer­ing. In oth­er words, she moved from teach­ing peo­ple how to under­stand curves on paper to help­ing peo­ple sur­vive the harsh curves of life, where resources run out, and insti­tu­tions decide who is worth attention.

What makes that turn so strik­ing is that it was not a brief detour or a sen­ti­men­tal end­ing. Accounts of Agnesi’s final decades con­sis­tent­ly describe a per­son who gave away her resources, lived a qui­et life, and accept­ed the mate­r­i­al con­se­quences of that choice, dying in 1799 with lit­tle left for her­self. That is not the arc of an “eccen­tric genius” who lost inter­est in her tal­ent. It is the arc of some­one who treat­ed intel­lect as a form of respon­si­bil­i­ty, then fol­lowed that respon­si­bil­i­ty into the hard­est kind of work. This kind does not come with applause.

When she passed away, she was buried in a mass grave for the poor, along­side about fif­teen oth­ers. Some accounts describe them as women from the very insti­tu­tion where Agne­si had spent years car­ing for the sick.

To me, that detail changes the emo­tion­al tem­per­a­ture of her whole life sto­ry, because it turns her end­ing into a deci­sion about belong­ing. She had been offered hon­ors, titles, and the kind of rep­u­ta­tion that usu­al­ly demands a mon­u­ment, and she seems to have stepped away from all of it in the most final, phys­i­cal way pos­si­ble. If she chose to be buried with­out a mark­er, in com­mon ground, then she was refus­ing the idea that her life need­ed to end as a pub­lic sym­bol. She was plac­ing her­self, lit­er­al­ly, among the women she had lived along­side, the women she had served, and the women whose suf­fer­ing she did not treat as a sep­a­rate cat­e­go­ry from her own human­i­ty. That is not a rejec­tion of her intel­lect. It is the com­ple­tion of it: the same mind that made knowl­edge more acces­si­ble also made dig­ni­ty more acces­si­ble, and in the end, she asked for no spe­cial treat­ment, only prox­im­i­ty to those she held dear.

[1] Lamb, Eve­lyn. “The 18th-Cen­tu­ry Lady Math­e­mati­cian Who Loved Cal­cu­lus and God.” Smith­son­ian Mag­a­zine. Accessed Feb­ru­ary 11, 2026. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/18th-century-lady-mathematician-who-changed-how-calculus-was-taught-180969078/.

[2] Lamb, Eve­lyn. “The 18th-Cen­tu­ry Lady Math­e­mati­cian Who Loved Cal­cu­lus and God.” Smith­son­ian Mag­a­zine. Accessed Feb­ru­ary 11, 2026. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/18th-century-lady-mathematician-who-changed-how-calculus-was-taught-180969078/.

[3] Find­len, Paula. “Cal­cu­la­tions of Faith: Math­e­mat­ics, Phi­los­o­phy, and Sanc­ti­ty in 18th-Cen­tu­ry Italy (New Work on Maria Gae­tana Agne­si).” His­to­ria Math­e­mat­i­ca 38, no. 2 (2011): 248–91. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.hm.2010.05.003.

[4] Eduati, Lau­ra. “What We Owe to Maria Gae­tana — L’Osservatore Romano.” Jour­nal. L’Osservatore Romano, Vat­i­can, June 1, 2024. https://www.osservatoreromano.va/en/news/2024–06/dcm-006/what-we-owe-to-maria-gaetana.html.

[5] Find­len, Paula. “Cal­cu­la­tions of Faith: Math­e­mat­ics, Phi­los­o­phy, and Sanc­ti­ty in 18th-Cen­tu­ry Italy (New Work on Maria Gae­tana Agne­si).” His­to­ria Math­e­mat­i­ca 38, no. 2 (2011): 248–91. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.hm.2010.05.003.

[6] Lamb, Eve­lyn. “The 18th-Cen­tu­ry Lady Math­e­mati­cian Who Loved Cal­cu­lus and God.” Smith­son­ian Mag­a­zine. Accessed Feb­ru­ary 11, 2026. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/18th-century-lady-mathematician-who-changed-how-calculus-was-taught-180969078/.

[7] Find­len, Paula. “Cal­cu­la­tions of Faith: Math­e­mat­ics, Phi­los­o­phy, and Sanc­ti­ty in 18th-Cen­tu­ry Italy (New Work on Maria Gae­tana Agne­si).” His­to­ria Math­e­mat­i­ca 38, no. 2 (2011): 248–91. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.hm.2010.05.003.

[8] “Insti­tuzioni Analitiche Ad Uso Del­la Gioven­tù Ital­iana | Work by Agne­si | Bri­tan­ni­ca.” Accessed Feb­ru­ary 11, 2026. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Instituzioni-analitiche-ad-uso-della-gioventu-italiana.

[9] Huff­man, Cyn­thia J. “Math­e­mat­i­cal Trea­sure: Maria Agnesi’s Ana­lyt­i­cal Insti­tu­tions in Ital­ian and Eng­lish | Math­e­mat­i­cal Asso­ci­a­tion of Amer­i­ca.” Con­ver­gence, Math­e­mat­i­cal Asso­ci­a­tion of Amer­i­ca, Jan­u­ary 2017. https://old.maa.org/press/periodicals/convergence/mathematical-treasure-maria-agnesi-s-analytical-institutions-in-italian-and-english?utm_source=chatgpt.com.

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[11] Roero, Clara Sil­via. “M.G. Agne­si, R. Rampinel­li and the Ric­cati Fam­i­ly: A Cul­tur­al Fel­low­ship Formed for an Impor­tant Sci­en­tif­ic Pur­pose, the Insti­tuzioni Analitiche.” His­to­ria Math­e­mat­i­ca 42, no. 3 (2015): 296–314. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.hm.2014.12.001.

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[13] Bish­op, Amy. Maria Gae­tana Agne­si. July 7, 2021. https://iastate.pressbooks.pub/cardinaltales1/chapter/rare-book-highlights-maria-gaetana-agnesi/.

[14] Bish­op, Amy. Maria Gae­tana Agne­si. July 7, 2021. https://iastate.pressbooks.pub/cardinaltales1/chapter/rare-book-highlights-maria-gaetana-agnesi/.

[15] Huff­man, Cyn­thia J. “Math­e­mat­i­cal Trea­sure: Maria Agnesi’s Ana­lyt­i­cal Insti­tu­tions in Ital­ian and Eng­lish | Math­e­mat­i­cal Asso­ci­a­tion of Amer­i­ca.” Con­ver­gence, Math­e­mat­i­cal Asso­ci­a­tion of Amer­i­ca, Jan­u­ary 2017. https://old.maa.org/press/periodicals/convergence/mathematical-treasure-maria-agnesi-s-analytical-institutions-in-italian-and-english?utm_source=chatgpt.com.

[16] Huff­man, Cyn­thia J. “Math­e­mat­i­cal Trea­sure: Maria Agnesi’s Ana­lyt­i­cal Insti­tu­tions in Ital­ian and Eng­lish | Math­e­mat­i­cal Asso­ci­a­tion of Amer­i­ca.” Con­ver­gence, Math­e­mat­i­cal Asso­ci­a­tion of Amer­i­ca, Jan­u­ary 2017. https://old.maa.org/press/periodicals/convergence/mathematical-treasure-maria-agnesi-s-analytical-institutions-in-italian-and-english?utm_source=chatgpt.com.

[17] Roero, Clara Sil­via. “M.G. Agne­si, R. Rampinel­li and the Ric­cati Fam­i­ly: A Cul­tur­al Fel­low­ship Formed for an Impor­tant Sci­en­tif­ic Pur­pose, the Insti­tuzioni Analitiche.” His­to­ria Math­e­mat­i­ca 42, no. 3 (2015): 296–314. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.hm.2014.12.001.

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[19] Huff­man, Cyn­thia J. “Math­e­mat­i­cal Trea­sure: Maria Agnesi’s Ana­lyt­i­cal Insti­tu­tions in Ital­ian and Eng­lish | Math­e­mat­i­cal Asso­ci­a­tion of Amer­i­ca.” Con­ver­gence, Math­e­mat­i­cal Asso­ci­a­tion of Amer­i­ca, Jan­u­ary 2017. https://old.maa.org/press/periodicals/convergence/mathematical-treasure-maria-agnesi-s-analytical-institutions-in-italian-and-english?utm_source=chatgpt.com.

[20] Osen, Lynn M. Women in Math­e­mat­ics. With Inter­net Archive. Cam­bridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1974. http://archive.org/details/womeninmathemati00osen.

[21] Gun­der­man, Richard, and David Gun­der­man. “Maria Agne­si, the Great­est Female Math­e­mati­cian You’ve Nev­er Heard Of.” Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can. Accessed April 8, 2026. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/maria-agnesi-the-greatest-female-mathematician-youve-never-heard-of/.

[22] Maz­zot­ti, Mas­si­mo. The World of  Maria Gae­tana Agne­si,  Math­e­mati­cian  of God. Edit­ed by Ronald Calinger. Vol. 1. Milano, 1836. Reprint, The Johns Hop­kins Uni­ver­si­ty Press, 2007.

[23] Eduati, Lau­ra. “What We Owe to Maria Gae­tana — L’Osservatore Romano.” Jour­nal. L’Osservatore Romano, Vat­i­can, June 1, 2024. https://www.osservatoreromano.va/en/news/2024–06/dcm-006/what-we-owe-to-maria-gaetana.html.

[24] Eduati, Lau­ra. “What We Owe to Maria Gae­tana — L’Osservatore Romano.” Jour­nal. L’Osservatore Romano, Vat­i­can, June 1, 2024. https://www.osservatoreromano.va/en/news/2024–06/dcm-006/what-we-owe-to-maria-gaetana.html.