Timeline 1718Born in Milan on 16 May, the first of the 21 children of Pietro Agnesi, a wealthy silk merchant. 1727At nine, recites in Latin a speech defending women’s education. 1738Publishes the Propositiones philosophicae, 191 theses on philosophy and natural science that she defended at the gatherings in her father’s house. 1739Asks her father to let her enter a convent; he refuses. 1748Publishes the first volume of the Instituzioni analitiche, dedicated to Empress Maria Theresa. The second comes out in 1749. 1750Pope Benedict XIV appoints her to the chair of mathematics at the University of Bologna. She never goes to Bologna. 1752Her father dies. Agnesi leaves mathematics and begins caring for poor and sick women. 1771The Pio Albergo Trivulzio, a hospice for the elderly poor, is founded in Milan. Agnesi is asked to direct the women’s wing. 1799Dies on 9 January, at the hospice, and is buried in a common grave. The girl of the salons Maria Gaetana Agnesi was born in Milan on 16 May 1718. The city was then the capital of a duchy ruled by the Habsburgs of Vienna. Her father, Pietro Agnesi, had grown rich in the silk trade and wanted the family to rise in Milanese society. He married three times and had 21 children. Maria Gaetana was the eldest.