Question 1

Who was Émilie du Châtelet?

Accepted Answer

A French natural philosopher and mathematician of the early eighteenth century whose translation and commentary on Newton's *Principia* remains the standard French edition — and whose own work on energy anticipated a concept physics would not settle for another century.

**Her situation.** Born in 1706 into the French aristocracy, she was unusually well educated for a woman of her time, being taught languages and mathematics, and later studied under Maupertuis and Clairaut. Academies were closed to women; she was famously refused entry to a café where scientists met and reportedly returned in men's clothing.

**Her substantive contributions:**

**The *Principia* translation.** She rendered Newton's Latin into French and — more importantly — added an extensive commentary recasting his geometric arguments in the **calculus notation** then developing on the continent, making the work genuinely usable by French mathematicians. Published after her death, it is still the standard French text.

**The *Institutions de Physique*** (1740), an ambitious textbook attempting to reconcile Newtonian physics with Leibnizian metaphysics — an intellectual synthesis rather than a summary.

**Kinetic energy.** This is her sharpest technical contribution. The prevailing Newtonian view held that a moving body's "force" was proportional to its velocity. Drawing on Leibniz and on **Willem 's Gravesande's experiments dropping balls into clay**, she argued it was proportional to the **square** of velocity — the relationship underlying kinetic energy and the conservation of energy. She was substantially right, at a time when the question was genuinely contested.

**Work on fire**, submitted anonymously to an Academy competition, which proposed that heat and light are related and speculated about what would later be understood as infrared radiation.

**Her partnership with Voltaire** — intellectual as much as romantic — is how most people encounter her, and it consistently overshadows the fact that she was the better mathematician of the two.

**She died in 1749**, days after childbirth, at 42, having pressed to finish the Newton commentary first.

Question 2

Who was Emmy Noether?

Accepted Answer

A German mathematician whose work underpins both modern abstract algebra and theoretical physics — and who spent much of her career barred from the positions her work merited. Noether's theorem,

Question 3

Who was Mary Wollstonecraft?

Accepted Answer

An English writer and philosopher whose A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) is a foundational text of feminist political thought — and whose reputation was destroyed for a century by her

Question 4

Who was Ada Lovelace and what did she actually do?

Accepted Answer

Ada Lovelace, born Augusta Ada Byron in 1815, was a British mathematician best known for her work on Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine — a mechanical general-purpose computer that was designed in

Question 5

Who was Lise Meitner?

Accepted Answer

The physicist who, with Otto Frisch, worked out the theoretical explanation for nuclear fission and gave it its name — and who was then excluded from the Nobel Prize awarded for the discovery, in

Question 6

Who was Hypatia of Alexandria?

Accepted Answer

Hypatia was a mathematician, astronomer and philosopher who taught in Alexandria around AD 400, and one of the few women scholars of the ancient world whose reputation is securely documented by

Question 7

Who was Srinivasa Ramanujan?

Accepted Answer

An Indian mathematician of extraordinary and largely self-taught ability, who produced thousands of results — many previously unknown, some still being proved a century later — with almost no formal

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