Early Life
Maria Gaetana Agnesi was born in Milan on May 16, 1718, to a wealthy and literate family. Her father wanted to elevate his family into the Milanese nobility. In order to achieve his goal, he had married in 1717 Anna Fortunata Brivio. Her mother's death provided her the excuse to retire from public life. She took over management of the household.
Having been born in Milan, Maria was recognized as a child prodigy very early; she could speak both Italian and French at five years of age. By her thirteenth birthday she had acquired Greek, Hebrew, Spanish, German, Latin, and was referred to as the "Walking Polyglot". She even educated her younger brothers. When she was 9 years old, she composed and delivered an hour-long speech in Latin to some of the most distinguished intellectuals of the day. The subject was women's right to be educated. When she was fifteen, her father began to regularly gather in his house a circle of the most learned men in Bologna, before whom she read and maintained a series of theses on the most abstruse philosophical questions. Records of these meetings are given in Charles de Brosses' Lettres sur l'Italie and in the Propositiones Philosophicae, which her father had published in 1738. Maria was very shy in nature and did not like these meetings. Although her father refused to grant this wish of joining a convent, he agreed to let her live from that time on in an almost conventual semi-retirement, avoiding all interactions with society and devoting herself entirely to the study of mathematics. During that time, Maria studied both differential and integral calculus. Her father, Pietro Agnesi, also married twice more after Maria's mother died, so that Maria Agnesi ended up the oldest of 21 children. In addition to her performances and lessons, her responsibility was to teach her siblings. This task kept her from her own goal of entering a convent. Fellow philosophers thought she was extremely beautiful and her family was recognized as one of the wealthiest in Milan.
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