The Impact and Legacy of The Ladies' Diary (1704-1840): A Women's Declaration

ISBN-13: 9781470462666

Frank J. Swetz

Opis

The Ladies' Diary was an annual almanac published in England from 1704 to 1840. It was designed to provide useful information to women; the subtitle reveals the purpose, Containing New Improvements in Arts and Sciences, and Many Entertaining Particulars: Designed for the Use and Diversion of the Fair Sex. It contained meteorological and astronomical information, recipes, health and medical advice, scientific information, and mathematical puzzles and problems. Readers were encouraged to, and did, send solutions and original problems and puzzles of their own for publication in the next year's issue. Frank Swetz, one of the founding Editors of Convergence, the MAA's online journal of the history of mathematics, wondered about the historical and sociological conditions that supported The Ladies' Diary. In this volume he unearths the story of the Diary's creation and of the community of people surrounding it. We learn who the editors were and something about the contributors and readers. Swetz explores the sociological and cultural circumstances that made this unique almanac full of mathematics popular for over a century. The book includes scores of puzzles from the Diary, many in the form of riddles, rebuses, and poems.

Spis treści

• A fortuitous encounter
• The Ladies' Diary: or, Woman's Almanack: A new kind of publication
• The Ladies' Diary: Conception and evolution
• ``Delightful and entertaining particulars'' --Problem solving
• Mathematics, education, and women in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England
• The Ladies' Diary as a facet in the mathematical and scientific transition of the era
• ""Dia"" as a mathematical testament
• Women and the Diary
• The Ladies' Diary, a noteworthy heritage
• Epilogue
• Appendix A: Selected word puzzles from The Ladies' Diary
• Appendix B: Sample of a complete set of Ladies' Diary mathematical exercises
• Appendix C: Selected problems with worked solutions
• Bibliography
• Notes.