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GREAT WOMAN OF MATHEMATICS: EMILIE DU CHATELET, 1706-1749. Growing up in the household of a member of French nobility gave her better access to education than was typical for women in her era. Her father arranged for the secretary of the French Academy of Science to see #GWOM 1/8
his brilliant daughter and talk to her about science, and arranged tutoring for her. This encouragement of her intellect stoked her lifelong advocacy of education for women, and it also paid huge dividends. By age 12, she was fluent in at least four languages. At age 18, she 2/8
was married to a 34-yr-old nobleman, an arrangement that was advantageous to both families. She had several children, pausing her studies, but resumed them at age 26. She studied maths from Clairaut (of Clairaut's theorem) and determined to access knowledge any way she could. 3/8
When ejected from the Cafe Gradot, a place of intellectual discussion, for being a woman, she simply donned men's clothing and returned. She had a longstanding love affair with Voltaire, so widely known that she appears as his muse in the illustration of his book on Newton's 4/8
philosophy. Her partnership with him led to her first scientific publication, as they disagreed on the nature of fire and submitted opposing viewpoints to a competition. Her writing was extensive and influential. She argued persuasively for the primacy of a priori principles, 5/8
opposing Locke. She wrote a physics text in 1740. In 1741, Immanuel Kant was even accused of stealing her ideas in one of his publications. She proposed the hypothesis of conservation of total energy and quantified its relationship to mass and velocity empirically, by doing 6/8
experiments showing that energy was distinct from momentum and thus proving both Newton and Voltaire wrong. Her results would later to expanded by Euler and Lagrange. She completed her most enduring work in 1749, a translation into French, adding her own commentary and maths 7/8
to Newton's Principia. It remains the standard French translation today. Her work, especially this book, helped forward the scientific revolution across Europe in ways far too numerous for a tweet thread. She died in childbirth at age 42, prematurely ending a brilliant life. 8/8
This thread regularly brings out people, generally men, insisting she wasn't actually smart and didn't do the things reported. I doubt it will help much, but here's a citation: https://www.gsjournal.net/Science-Journals/Research%20Papers.../Download/4553
