In mathematics, figures are numbers and geometric forms. The languages that nonhuman figures speak are varied in the extreme. Between them all, she wrote, "figures are a common language." While on her first trip to Europe in 1857, Mitchell, by then a famous astronomer and the only female member of the American Astronomical Society, met with many of her scientific, literary and artistic heroes. Most overtly, the "figures" of Popova's narrative are the human beings whose stories she uses to illuminate her thesis that, as per Kepler's journey of triumph and terror, life is lived for us all "between chance and choice."īut the word "figure" has other connotations, too, and one suspects that Popova may have been drawn to these further dimensions of its meaning from a quote in Maria Mitchell's diary.
One is reminded of the 18th-century polymath Athanasius Kircher's declaration: "The world is bound by secret knots." It is as if in her vast reading of source materials, especially original correspondence, she has fitted her brain with a set of filters to sift out references that might link any of her figures to any other. Popova's Figuring is an intricate tapestry in which the lives of these women, and dozens of other scientific and literary figures, are woven together through threads of connection across four centuries, linking one to another in unexpected chains through mutual friends, serendipity, meetings, letters and even lovers. As Popova writes, "The difference between the fates of the sexes, Kepler suggests, is not in the heavens but in the earthly construction of gender."Ĭhief among them are Kepler's intellectual descendents, astronomers Maria Mitchell and Caroline Herschel, mathematician Mary Somerville, marine biologist/environmentalist Rachel Carson, writer/critic Margaret Fuller, artist Harriet Hosmer, and poet Emily Dickinson - women who all embody the landmark assertion of 17th-century philosopher Francois Poullain de la Barre that "the mind has no sex." Popova movingly reports that this led Kepler to another leap of perspectival insight: that, being female, his mother had not had the benefit of an education and was thus at the mercy of "learned" men. At the end of a long and painful process his mother was saved, but her treatment in prison weakened and finally killed her.
He did nothing by halves, including defending his mother from accusations of witchcraft, a charge that he believed was precipitated by his Dream book. Kepler is beloved by historians for the powerful mixing in his life of mathematical rigor and aesthetical play. It was Kepler who understood first that mathematical figures hidden in the dance of the planets implied that these bodies are driven by real physical forces, thereby making him the first true astrophysicist. Though Kepler isn't nearly as famous as Newton or Copernicus, he is their equal - and arguably a more important figure than Copernicus.
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