I finished Fermat's Enigma last night and was surprised how much I enjoyed a book about math.
I've always seen myself as a liberal arts guy, but in the last couple years I've been reading a lot of computer history books that each have some flavor of mathematics. I struggled so much with math in school that it's hard to disassociate with that feeling and appreciate numbers as a cool thing.
Coming back to these topics in adulthood is a much different experience, especially when there's no pressure to make a grade. The 17-century amateur mathematicians of the world were basically all doing it as a hobby. These dudes were coming home from work thirsty for theorems.
That's the sentiment Susan Rigetti is trying to inspire in her article So You Want to Study Mathematics, which includes a curriculum and reading list that recommends this book.
Anyway the book steps through history by way of various mathematicians that came into contact with Fermat's theorem in one way or another. One was Sophie Germain, a French woman who endured an unsurprising (but no less disappointing) amount of misogyny in her quest to study number theory.
According to the text, 17th-century France was especially backwards in its attitude toward women and education. Advanced concepts in math were considered a man's field, however women were expected to have some light exposure if only to be a stimulating conversation partner at parties or whatever.
So there were special books for this purpose. One was called Sir Isaac Newton's Philosophy Explain'd for the Use of Ladies. The author (who was not Newton), believed that women were interested only in romance, so he tried to explain Newton's discoveries in the form of flirtatious dialogue.
In one scene, someone is describing the inverse square law of gravitational attraction, to which the woman (surely on the verge of fainting), replies:
I cannot help thinking...that this proportion in the square of the distances of places...is observed even in love. Thus after eight days' absence love becomes sixty-four times less than it was the first day.
Someone call The Ripped Bodice and get a reprint going because this is hot stuff.