Clelia Grillo Borromeo

Clelia Grillo Borromeo Arese was an Italian natural philosopher, mathematician and scientist, born in Genoa in 1684 to a patrician family of northern Italy and dying in Milan on 23 August 1777. Educated first by her mother and then in a convent, she learned several languages, mathematics, natural science and mechanics, spoke eight languages and was interested in geometry. She was famous for her ability to solve every mathematical problem put to her, and in 1707 she married Count Giovanni Benedetto Borromeo Arese. In 1719 she founded the Clelian Academy, the Academia Cloelia Vigilantium, which met in her Milan palace on the model of the Accademia del Cimento, the Royal Society and the French Academy of Sciences, with members including Luigi Guido Grandi, Tommaso Ceva and Giovanni Girolamo Saccheri, and which helped spread Newtonian physics and Leibnizian philosophy in Italy. In 1728 Grandi dedicated to her his book on the curves now called Clelia curves.