Maria Gaetana Agnesi was born in Milan, Italy, the eldest of a wealthy silk merchant's many children, and would become a celebrated mathematician.
Maria Gaetana Agnesi was born on May 16, 1718, in Milan, then part of the Duchy of Milan under Habsburg rule. She was the eldest of at least twenty-one children born to Pietro Agnesi, a wealthy silk merchant who had risen into the ranks of the Milanese aristocracy, and his first wife Anna Fortunata Brivio.
Recognizing his daughter's extraordinary precocity, Pietro Agnesi provided her with an exceptional education, hiring a series of tutors, many of them clergymen, to instruct her in languages, philosophy, natural science, and mathematics. By the age of five she reportedly spoke French; by eleven she had mastered Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Spanish, and German, earning her the nickname "Seven-Tongued Orator."
Her father used her as a showpiece, having her debate learned men at elaborate salons held in the family home, where she would defend theses on natural philosophy and mathematics in front of Milanese society and visiting scholars. This unusual upbringing, unprecedented for a woman of her era, laid the foundation for her later mathematical achievements and her landmark treatise, Instituzioni analitiche, published in 1748.