mathematics

Maria Gaetana Agnesi was an Italian polymath with a heart of gold. Born into a wealthy Milanese family, Agnesi's brilliance was used to entertain family friends and visitors from an early age. She was a child prodigy, speaking 7 languages by the age of 10 and delivering speeches in Latin about the education of women to her father's circle of academics and intellectuals. As the eldest of 21 children, Agnesi was tasked with teaching the others, a responsibility that inspired this book. Finding mathematical textbooks insufficient, Agnesi originally began writing this text for her siblings.

Maria Gaetana Agnesi was an Italian polymath with a heart of gold. Born into a wealthy Milanese family, Agnesi's brilliance was used to entertain family friends and visitors from an early age. She was a child prodigy, speaking 7 languages by the age of 10 and delivering speeches in Latin about the education of women to her father's circle of academics and intellectuals. As the eldest of 21 children, Agnesi was tasked with teaching the others, a responsibility that inspired this book. Finding mathematical textbooks insufficient, Agnesi originally began writing this text for her siblings.

“The basic premise of this book is that mathematical procedures are useful, and sometimes necessary, for the description and understanding of biological systems,” writes author Harvey J. Gold. Biological systems are among the most complex systems studied by scientists. Models are used to explain systems and to study different variables in an objective way. Today most mathematical models are run on computers, but when this book was published in the 1970s, computer information systems were relatively new and most equations were calculated manually.