Literary Methods in the Social Sciences Numbers and Narratives

Why have there been so few women mathematicians? This book does not seek an answer in absence but in the forces, ruptures, and intensities that shape the becoming of a femme philosophe—a mathematician, scientist, and philosopher—within the shifting assemblages of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. Why have there been so few women mathematicians? This book does not seek an answer in absence but in the forces, ruptures, and intensities that shape the becoming of a femme philosophe—a mathematician, scientist, and philosopher—within the shifting assemblages of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. Moving beyond exclusion as mere negation, it traces the conditions of emergence, the differential speeds and slippages through which women entered, inhabited, and transformed the mathematical sciences. Drawing on auto/biographical documents, literary and philosophical writings, and the materialities of the archive, this book approaches the digital turn not as a tool but as a plane of composition, where new trajectories of memory work unfold. Between historiography and fabulation, it maps a space where women’s mathematical thought was not only possible but inevitable—if only in flashes, excesses, and détours. This book will resonate with scholars in the sociology, history, and philosophy of science and mathematics, particularly those engaged with feminist thought, the politics of knowledge, and experimental archival methods.