Like Alicia Boole, Russian mathematician Sofia Kovalevskaya (1850-1891) had to be tutored privately (Flood & Wilson, 2011, p.167). Female German mathematician Emmy Noether (1882-1935), who made a significant contribution to invariant theory, was discriminated against at different stages of her career due to her gender and Jewish origin. Since women were viewed as disadvantaged in their intelligence level, they were excluded from Oxford or Cambridge until the 1860s to 1870s, and could not earn a degree from these two privileged universities until 19 respectively (BBC, 2019).

The fourth-dimension concept offered a great stage for drama and art in the late 19th century and first two decades of the 20th century (Ibanez, 2017). Hinton, who was married to Mary Boole, the eldest of the five daughters of the renowned mathematician George Boole, taught Mary’s sister Alicia about tesseracts and Alicia edited one of Hinton’s books about the fourth dimension (Chas, 2019).

Flatland was inspired by mathematician and science fiction writer Charles Howard Hinton (1853-1907), who was interested in the fourth dimension, and coined a word – tesseract – for the four-dimensional hypercube. Abbott’s written works covered various topics. Abbott (1838-1926) was a graduate of Cambridge, and worked as the headmaster of the City of London School (MacTutor, 2005). This essay will focus on how Abbott, using Flatland as a satire, exposed the injustice of women’s situations in Victorian times and Abbott’s effort to improve education, especially that for women.Įdwin A. Square in the preface to the second edition in 1885, had to explain that, as a historian, he had “identified himself (perhaps too closely) with the views generally adopted in Flatland and even by Spaceland Historians” (Abbott, 1884a, p.9), and in fact he believed that the straight lines (women) were superior to circles (the priests forming the top of the social caste) in many respects. The description by Square, the protagonist from Flatland, that women were regarded inferior to men was so vivid that the author was denounced by contemporary book reviewers as a misogynist. It quickly gained popularity as a science fiction story for the introduction of higher dimensions but also it is a satire criticising social inequality in Victorian Britain. Abbott was first published under the pseudonym of A. She has commented that she absolutely enjoyed the study and appreciated the opportunity of the summer research project.įlatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin A. Xiang Fu completed her Open University mathematics with statistics bachelor degree with first class class honours this July. This blog post focuses on the status of women in mathematics in Victorian times, and today. This blog post was written by our summer research student Xiang Fu, who was supervised by Andrew Potter and June Barrow-Green.

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