Witch of Agnesi.

I recently ran across the Russian expression локон Аньези ‘curl of Agnesi’ and wondered “Why do we call it ‘witch of Agnesi’?” So I googled and found this explanation at Wikipedia: It gets its name from Italian mathematician Maria Gaetana Agnesi who published it in 1748. The Italian name la versiera di Agnesi is based on Latin versoria (sheet of sailing ships) and the sinus versus. This was read by John Colson as l’avversiera di Agnesi, where avversiera is translated as “woman who is against God” and interpreted as “witch”. That’s quite a story, but I’m not sure about the “read as avversiera” part, because apparently Italian versiera can mean ‘witch, she-devil,’ so there’s no need to charge poor Colson with misreading, just misunderstanding. The OED, s.v. witch (revised 2021), has: II.8. Mathematics. More fully witch of Agnesi. A bell-shaped plane curve symmetrical about the y axis and that approaches the x axis as an asymptote, constructed geometrically from a circle whose base is…