, an Italian lady of great learning, was born at Milan, March 16,
, an Italian
lady of great learning, was born at Milan, March 16, 1718.
Her inclinations from her earliest youth led her to the
study of science, and at an age when young persons of her
sex attend only to frivolous pursuits, she had made such
astonishing progress in mathematics, that when in 1750
her father, professor in the university at Bologna, was unable to continue his lectures from infirm health, she obtained permission from the pope, Benedict XIV. to fill his
chair. Before this, at the early age of nineteen, she had
supported one hundred and ninety-one theses, which were
published, in 1738, under the title “Propositiones Philosophicæ.” She was also mistress of Latin, Greek, Hebrew,
French, German, and Spanish. At length she gave up her
studies, and went into the monastery of the Blue Nuns, at
Milan, where she died Jan. 9, 1799. In 1740 she published a discourse tending to prove “that the study of the
liberal arts is not incompatible with the understandings of
women,
” This she had written when scarcely nine years
old. Her “Instituzioni analitiche,
” Traites elementaires du Calcul
differentiel et du Calcul integral,
”