WOMEN IN MATHEMATICS 165 



It is pleasant to record that this woman of masculine 

 mind, masculine energy and masculine genius, far from 

 being mannish or unwomanly, was, on the contrary, a 

 woman of a truly feminine heart; and that, although a 

 giantess in intellectual attainments, she was in grace and 

 charm and delicacy of sentiment one of the noblest types of 

 beautiful womanhood. She could with the greatest ease 

 turn from a lecture on Abel's Functions or a research on 

 Saturn's rings to the writing of verse in French or of a 

 novel in Russian or to collaborating with her friend, the 

 Duchess of Cajanello, on a drama in Swedish, or to making 

 a lace collar for her little daughter, Fouzi, to whom she was 

 most tenderly attached. 1 



Little more than a quarter of a century has elapsed since 

 Strindberg, expressing the sentiment of the great majority 

 of the men of his time, declared that a woman professor of 



iTo a friend, who expressed surprise at her fluttering to and 

 fro between mathematics and literature, she made a reply which de- 

 serves a place here, as it gives a better idea than anything else of 

 the wonderful versatility of this gifted daughter of Russia. "I 

 understand/' she writes, "your surprise at my being able to busy 

 myself simultaneously with literature and mathematics. Many 

 who have never had an opportunity of knowing any more about 

 mathematics confound it with arithmetic, and consider it an arid 

 science. In reality, however, it is a science which requires a great 

 amount of imagination, and one of the leading mathematicians of our 

 century states the case quite correctly when he says that it is im- 

 possible to be a mathematician without being a poet in soul. Only, 

 of course, in order to comprehend the accuracy of this definition, 

 one must renounce the ancient prejudice that a poet must invent 

 something which does not exist, that imagination and invention are 

 identical. It seems to me that the poet has only to perceive that 

 which others do not perceive, to look deeper than others look. And 

 the mathematician must do the same thing. As for myself, all my 

 life I have been unable to decide for which I had the greater inclina- 

 tion, mathematics or literature. As soon as my brain grows wearied 

 of purely abstract speculations it immediately begins to incline to 

 observations on life, to narrative, and vice versa, everything in life 

 begins to appear insignificant and uninteresting, and only the 



