A Biography of Maria Gaetana Agnesi, an Eighteenth-Century Woman Mathematician: With Translations of Some of Her Work from Italian into English is a biography of Italian mathematician and philosopher Maria Gaetana Agnesi (1718–1799). It was written and translated by Antonella Cupillari, with a foreword by Patricia R. Allaire, and published in 2008 by the Edwin Mellen Press.

The main part of the book, over 100 pages, is a translation into English of an Italian-language biography of Agnesi, Elogio storico di Donna Maria Gaetana Agnesi, which was written in the year of her death by historian Antonio Francesco Frisi and republished in 1965.^[1] It covers the cultural background that allowed her to become a mathematician, and her brief mathematical career from her teens to her thirties, as well as her work caring for the needy in the remaining fifty years of her life.^[2]

Frisi was a family friend of Agnesi. He was the first to write a biography about her. To balance this material with a more objective view of Agnesi,^[2] Cupillari has added over 50 pages of notes,^[1] derived from two more Italian-language biographies of Agnesi, Maria Gaetana Àgnesi (Luisa Anzoletti, 1900) and Maria Gaetana Agnesi (Giovanna Tilche, 1984).^[3] Another large section includes translations and explanations of excerpts from Agnesi's mathematical textbook, Institutioni Analitiche (1748),^[1][3] which was "the first textbook to provide a unified treatment of algebra, Cartesian geometry and calculus", and by being written in vernacular Italian rather than Latin was aimed at a wider audience than the educated scholars of her day.^[2] Cupillari concludes her biography with a bibliography of material about Agnesi.^[1]

Reviewers Luigi Pepe and Franka Bruckler recommend the book as a "useful introduction" and "unique, comprehensive source" on Agnesi and her work, particularly for people who read English but not Italian.^[1][3] Bruckler includes among its potential readers historians of mathematics, mathematics educators, and members of the public.^[3] Reviewer Edith Mendez describes the book as "an easy read", and its mathematics as accessible to undergraduate mathematics students,^[4] but this is contradicted by Peter Ruane, who found the "fragmented" and "eulogistic" first part difficult to follow and to stomach.^[2] Mendez also criticizes the book for being inadequately copyedited,^[4] and Ruane suggests that the book would have been improved by more context of what was happening in mathematics in Europe at the time.^[2]