What drives us to learn? Are people with unusual intellectual capabilities also predisposed to want to use them? The case of Maria Gaetana Agnesi (1718-1799) raises these questions, because she possessed a rarified mind in an era when women of her social class were expected to marry and attend to domestic affairs rather than academic pursuits. By age eleven she had mastered seven languages. As a child she was delivering Latin orations to her father’s wealthy male friends. She wrote the first mathematics textbook discussing both differential and integral calculus, and was the first woman appointed as a professor of mathematics. There is even a mathematical concept with her name: it is a math curve called “The Witch of Agnesi” (see the second image). But this scholar’s trajectory changed dramatically sometime after the death of her father. Always religious, Agnesi turned her time completely to caring for the poor of her city in Milan. She opened up a pauper’s home, lived as sparsely as the nuns who served there, and gave all her considerable wealth away. In fact, she died poor, and was buried in an unmarked mass grave with fifteen other bodies. Clearly a person with direction, what changed for Agnesi? Or, was the apparent change in careers motivated by a constant? Maria herself had written about how the study of mathematics was for her a way to understand God, and her charitable work was also motivated by religious zeal. One wonders if her physical health, never sturdy but later in life increasingly faulty, made her switch. Was she ultimately satisfied with her studies in mathematics? She really had to go against social conventions to embark in a scientific career — was her youth to partially explain for her interest in this way? Agnesi’s father encouraged her math studies and didn’t want his daughter to join a convent: maybe his death allowed Maria more choices than before, and therefore her great interest in charity had been simmering all along. What potentials exist, and why some get expressed while others quieted, is an endlessly fascinating question about the human nature.
