Celebrating Maria Gaetana Agnesi's 296th Birthday

Google is honoring Maria Gaetana Agnesi's 296th birthday today with an animated Google doodle that includes an animation of the curve bearing her name. 

Unfortunately, the doodle's reach is limited to Europe, Australia, and certain areas of Africa, Asia, and South America. While I'm pleased to see Maria recognized this way, I don't know why Google chose not to use the doodle here in the United States. Oh, well.

The good news is that the doodle is helping to spread the word about this amazing woman. Various news sites, like this one, feature reports about the doodle and Maria's life today. The bad news: some of these sites continue to repeat the common myths about her. For example, this site, reiterates the idea that Maria had to care for her 20 younger siblings after her mother died. I addressed part of this fallacy in an earlier post, explaining that her father remarried within two years of her mother's death. I neglected to mention in that post that when Maria's mother died, Maria had only 6 siblings. So she never would have been responsible for all 20 of her siblings.

Also on the good news side: it's now easier to know how to pronounce Maria's name. I shared a post awhile back trying to explain how to say it. I recently found a clip online that I've copied below. If the clip doesn't work for you, you can listen to it here. 

Regular posts to this blog are still on hold, as I explained here. But I couldn't resist making time to acknowledge Maria on the anniversary of her birth. 

What's Pasta Got to Do with Maria Agnesi ?

When I was growing up, we sometimes ate a brand of pasta called Agnesi, the same spelling as Maria Gaetana Agnesi's last name. (As far as I know, there's no connection between Maria's family and the pasta company.) Since I was already familiar with the pasta when I learned about Maria, I had no trouble saying her name. It wasn't until I brought a draft of the biography to my critique group that I discovered that the pronunciation isn't obvious to everyone.

Unfortunately, I haven't found a way to upload an audio file to this website, so I can't demonstrate the pronunciation for you. However, I did find the following commercial for Agnesi pasta on YouTube.

Don't try to adjust your volume at the beginning, because there is silence for the first 10 seconds or so. Then a voice says, "Silenzio, parla Agnesi," which means "Silence, the Agnesi pasta is talking." The clip allows you to hear how an Italian pronounces the name "Agnesi."



In case you're still not sure how to say it, just remember that Maria's last name, Agnesi, rhymes with "lazy," despite the fact that she was anything but. If you find phonetic spellings helpful, I'd go with on yay zee. (Keep in mind, I'm not a linguist.) Note that you do not pronounce the "g"--the letter pair "gn" in Italian is pronounced like the "ni" in "onion." 

Maria's middle name, Gaetana, is a bit tricky to say, too. I would probably spell it phonetically as gah eh tah nah, though most Italians I know would combine the first two syllables together to sound like the English word "guy," so I think guy tah nah is also acceptable.

If you'd like to learn more about how to pronounce Italian words, you can see this website.

Have I made you hungry for some pasta?

Update 5/16/14: You can now hear Maria's whole name pronounced via YouTube. See this post for details.