Bringing the history of mathematics home: Entangled practices of domesticity, gender, and mathematical work

Constructing the "home-side" of a scientific legacy: Mary Everest Boole, pedagogy, and domesticity

The Victorian writer Mary Everest Boole (1832-1916) developed an idiosyncratic pedagogical treatment of arithmetic, algebra, and logic. Her pedagogy favored active, child-directed learning, and is now generally admired as ahead of its time, though it must be deciphered through fairly eccentric delivery. A recurring theme in Mrs. Boole's prolific writing is the misunderstood legacy of her late husband, the renowned mathematician and logician George Boole (1815-1864). As existing literature has shown, she worked to promote a morally and religiously charged understanding of his work. More fundamentally, she presented an all-encompassing pedagogical perspective on Mr. Boole's life and work. Across her voluminous publications, Mrs. Boole filtered everything-mathematics, logic, religion, morality, and homelife-through the lens of pedagogy. She used this expansive conception of teaching to span the gulf between professional and domestic work, thereby claiming a privileged domestic perspective on her husband's intellectual output and enlisting his legacy as a resource for her own writing. The Booles' entangled careers show how particular ways of practicing domesticity could shape and be shaped by mathematical identities and ideas.

Marrying the radical, the conventional, and the mystical: Mathematics, gender and religion in the lives of William Kingdon and Lucy Lane Clifford

The avowed atheist, evolutionary naturalist and mathematician William Kingdon Clifford is often remembered for his essay, "The Ethics of Belief," in which he opposed organized religion in any form. As a mathematician, Clifford was an early advocate of non-Euclidean geometry in England. Combining William Rowan Hamilton's work on quaternions with Hermann Grassmann's theory of linear extension, he invented an original system of geometric algebra. Breaking with conservative traditionalism in his philosophical and mathematical work, Clifford's marriage to the children's writer, novelist, and dramatist Lucy Lane was a relatively conventional, if brief, Victorian marriage. After his untimely death from consumption in 1879, Lucy outlived her husband by fifty years. Raising their two daughters and supporting herself after his passing, Lucy refashioned Clifford's posthumous reputation to temper his philosophical radicalism. Her collaboration with Clifford's publisher and editor reveal Lucy's concern that Clifford not be remembered as someone ruled by passion in his mathematical work. Her efforts to expunge writings suggestive of William's weakness, excitability, or inconstancy from the public record demonstrates her desire to craft an image of her husband in alignment with gendered expectations of masculinity. This paper argues that Lucy fashioning of William's memory conformed, rather than departed from, normative parameters of gender as defined by Victorian society.