Maria Gaetana Agnesi 1718-1799, Milan, Italy age 81
She was an Italian mathematician, philosopher, theologian, and humanitarian. She was the first woman to write a mathematics handbook and the first woman appointed as a mathematics professor at a university discussing both differential and integral calculus and was a member of the faculty at the University of Bologna, although she never served.

She devoted the last four decades of her life to studying theology (especially patristics) and to charitable work and serving the poor. She was a devout Catholic and wrote extensively on the marriage between intellectual pursuit and mystical contemplation, most notably in her essay Il Cielo mistico (The Mystic Heaven). She saw the rational contemplation of God as a complement to prayer and contemplation of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Maria Teresa Agnesi Pinottini, a clavi cembalist, and composer was her sister.

Maria was recognized early on as a child prodigy; she could speak both Italian and French at five years of age. By her eleventh birthday, she had also learned Greek, Hebrew, Spanish, German, and Latin, and was referred to as the “Seven-Tongued Orator”.
Agnesi suffered a mysterious illness at the age of twelve that was attributed to her excessive studying and reading, so she was prescribed vigorous dancing and horseback riding. This treatment did not work; she began to experience extreme convulsions, after which she was encouraged to pursue moderation.

By age fourteen, she was studying ballistics and geometry. 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 Propositions Philosophical, which her father had published in 1738 as an account of her final performance, where she defended 190 philosophical theses.

She was the second woman ever to be granted professorship at a university, Laura Bassi being the first In 1751, she became ill again and was told not to study by her doctors. After the death of her father in 1752, she carried out a long-cherished purpose by giving herself to the study of theology, and especially of the Fathers and devoted herself to the poor, homeless, and sick, giving away the gifts she had received and begging for money to continue her work with the poor.
In 1783, she founded and became the director of the Opera Pia Trivulzio, a home for Milan’s elderly, where she lived as the nuns of the institution did. On 9 January 1799, Maria Agnesi died poor and was buried in a mass grave for the poor with fifteen other bodies.

In 1996, an asteroid, 16765 Agnesi, was named after Agnesi. There is a crater on Venus named after her, too. There is also a mathematical curve named the Witch of Agnesi.
In 2017, the Family Coppola released a brandy named after Agnesi.