This is the portion of the site dedicated to giving an explanation of what on God's green Earth possesed me to construct a fan site on such a seemingly bizarre topic. Also, I hope to give you a bit of information on myself as well. (That is, providing, that no one is intending on stalking me... but I digress. I have more faith in my visitors than that!)
Now, I know what you are thinking. You are probably asking yourself the question: "Why on Earth would someone have a fan site dedicated to some deceased mathematician/scientist chick?" Ok. I admit. It is an odd subject for a fan site, but I did not pull this out of my... well you know... I do have a legitimate reason behind building this site, and I will share that with you here.
The truth is, this is more than just a "fan site," although I did get the inspiration from fan sites of a different nature. I do web design for my college, and this summer, I was designing a web site on world literature. So I spent a great deal of time searching for links on deceased authors. In my searches, I happened upon a number of college-student designed pages dedicated to these authors, and to why the designers viewed them as "influential" on thier lives. I was impressed. I thought it was so neat that students chose to build web pages about people they admire (rather than some anti-social propaganda or what not...) Then, I thought it was high time I built one of my own in the same vein. I would design an educational site dedicated to one of my heroes.
Choosing the subject matter for the site was no challenge. I had done 3 years of research on women in mathematics and science, and in all of my net searches, I had yet to find a "Fan site" dedicated to any of these women. So I decided to start a new trend. These women were a great source of inspiration for me because of the extreme challenges they had to face to achieve their dreams- and Sophie was the greatest influence of all the women I researched.
I am not sure why, but I grew intensely attatched to her character from my very first encounter with her story. i was eighteen, in my freshman year of college, and I was helping to research for a mathematical symposium being held at my school. I am not sure what attracted me to research Sophie in the first place- I think it was because I learned she lived at the time of the French Revolution (a time period with which I was admittedly obsessed...) Whatever it was, I found myself completely drawn into the story of this woman whose real life story seemed better than fiction.
In the years to come, I was to experience some rather trying times in my life. But I kept my head up. With Sophie as my inspiration, I viewed my problems as inferior as compared to the trials she had endured throughout her life, and I figured that if my heroine could pull through having a miserable time in life, so could I. And so I did, and it made me think "wow- if her story inspired me so much, perhaps is could inspire others! But no one even knows about her... and it's up to me to fix that!" Needles to say, here we are. You are witnessing it for yourself (don't you just feel so lucky?)
So that is the story on how Sophie's World got born into existence. Now you may be asking, if you searched the site a bit (and perhaps even if you haven't)"What's the deal with all these drawings, man?" Well- what is a website without graphics? AND i have another little secret to let out here- i am a first class Glenn Keane wannabe. I fancy myself quite the artist, although others may think otherwise. If you haven't noticed, my drawings have a "Disney like" flair to them- and if you don't know, Glenn Keane is by far THE coolest supervising animator for Disney animation. Yeah, i always wished I could be a Disney artist, so i just pretend...
The dilemma I ran into when building this site was the absence of any really good pictures of Sophie to feature here. There is, i think, ONE in the existance of the entire WORLD- and that is a photograph of a statue. Well- I had to fix that, so I decided to draw stuff. The end results are what you see here.
So- that, in a nutshell, is the story of me and my site... hope it cleared a few things up for you. Of course, if you have more questions, comments, or more links you would like to see featured here, feel free to drop me an email. If you would like to chat about what's featured on this page, you can look me up on AOL Instant Messenger. Username: SophieG76. WARNING- Serious chat only. I reserve the right to block any users using my handle as a means to talk trash or for other non-educational purposes. Remember- this is a "G" rated site I'm running here.
Happy surfing to all, and I hope you all leave here with a different idea about women and science. If you have, then I've done my part...
