Poor Robin's Prophecies by Wardhaugh Benjamin;

Author:Wardhaugh, Benjamin;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2012-06-20T04:00:00+00:00

In Friendship two Sisters together reside,

With Virtue replete; each a Stranger to Pride:

Maria for Beauty with Venus may vie,

And Cloe for Wisdom Minerva defy;

Maria is prudent in ev’ry Degree,

Whilst Cloe is court’ous, good-natur’d and free.

From what’s underwritten their Ages I ask:

Resolve it, dear Ladies; nor think’t a hard Task?

Given

x2 + xy + y2 = 1087,

x4 + x3y3 + y4 = 45777295;

To find the Value of x the Age of Maria, and that of y the Age of Cloe.

The Ladies’ Diary (or ‘Woman’s Almanack’), begun by a Coventry schoolmaster, John Tipper, in 1704, appeared annually until 1841. It thus had a similar lifespan to Poor Robin, and it took the same pocket-sized format as an almanac. It had some of the same content too: a yearly calendar with anniversaries and holy days, and a list of eclipses (it gave eclipse computations in detail). But it always had its intended audience of intellectually curious women in mind, and endeavoured to provide material which would be of interest: recipes, sketches of the lives of notable women, and so on. It had no prognostications, nor even weather predictions.

During the Diary’s early years the focus shifted decisively. A contribution of arithmetical problems by a (male) reader proved so popular, and similar material in subsequent years generated such a response, that mathematical problems and puzzles soon pushed aside much of the other content. Within a few years the Diary had come to serve a highly distinctive purpose, facilitating the discussion of mathematics by readers—both male and female—keen to improve their minds. The content of the Diary—apart from the calendar—came to consist quite substantially of mathematical problems, together with verbal ‘enigmas’ and other puzzles, and of course the solutions to last year’s problems sent in by readers (there were prizes, taking the form of free copies of the Diary for a certain number of years).

This was certainly congenial to Tipper, who taught at his school:

Writing, Arithmetick, Geometry, Trigonometry; the Doctrine of the Sphere, Astronomy, Algebra, with their Dependents, viz. Surveying, Gauging, Dialling, Navigation, and all other Mathematical Sciences; Also the True Grounds and Reasons of Musick.

Later editors of the Diary included well-known practical mathematicians and mathematical writers. In the later eighteenth century it was for a long period edited by Charles Hutton, whom we will meet in Chapter 7: one of the most significant individuals for popular and practical British mathematics in the period.

The Diary found imitators, including the inevitable Gentleman’s Diary, and there were several compendia, indexes, and supplements to its contents, including the Palladium; or Appendix to the Ladies’ Diary which was published annually during the third quarter of the century. It was the pattern for, in all, more than a dozen mathematical periodicals intended for a broad audience which appeared during the eighteenth century, though most were very short-lived.

The number of women contributors actually dropped over the 140 years of the Diary’s existence, and on the whole many more men than women seem to have contributed problems and solutions. Yet the Diary remained committed

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