Maria Agnesi

Maria Agnesi wrote an important systematic textbook of eighteenth-century calculus. Published in Milan in two volumes in 1748 and 1749, her Instituzioni analitiche ad uso della gioventù italiana organized algebra, analytic geometry, differential calculus, and integral calculus into a connected course. Pope Benedict XIV praised the work, and in 1750 Agnesi was offered a mathematics chair at the University of Bologna. Her name remained on the university rolls, but she never taught there. She later devoted most of her life to religious work and care for poor and ill people in Milan. The name “Witch of Agnesi” is commonly explained as a confusion that arose while translating the Italian word versiera into English.

This is a thought experiment about influence, not a verified historical fact.

Without Agnesi's textbook, one major route for learning algebra, analytic geometry, and calculus as a connected course would have been absent from eighteenth-century Europe. Other textbooks would have filled part of the gap, but the public precedent of a woman being recognized as the author of a large mathematical work might have looked different.