Emilie Du Chatelet
Emilie du Chatelet was an eighteenth-century physicist, mathematician and philosopher. Born into the minor nobility, Emilie owed the development of her intellect to the liberal attitude of her father, Louis Nicolas le Tonnelier de Breteuil. De Breteuil was already running a weekly salon for writers and scientists. He recognized his ten-year-old daughter had a brilliant mind. So he arranged for the secretary of the Academie des Sciences to visit her to discuss astronomy. By the age of twelve, Emilie was fluent in Latin, Italian, Greek and German, and a prodigious mathematician. She even devised a series of successful gambling strategies so she could win money to buy books.
Emilie’s mother wanted to send her to a convent to cure her of her strange ways. She managed to escape this fate. However, one fate she could not avoid was marriage. At eighteen, she married the Marquis Florent-Clause du Chastellet Lomont. It looked like her brilliant career was over. But in 1733, after the couple had three children, Emilie returned to her studies. She was 26. With her husband’s consent, she withdrew to her house at Cirey Sur Blaise to dedicate her time to maths and physics.
Emilie’s heydey had begun. She put forward theories on kinetic and total energy that the scientific community received with respect and wrote her treatise the “Foundations of Physics”. After losing a huge amount of money at cards, she developed the earliest form of financial derivatives, paying tax collectors a small sum for the rights to their future earnings, which she, in turn, she promised to her creditors. In between, she wrote discourses on feminine happiness, a critical analysis of the Bible and works on optics and free will.
In 1749, she translated French Sir Isaac Newton’s Principia into French. Emilie’s translation remains the authoritative French edition to this day. It was to be her last major achievement. In 1748, she began an affair with the poet Jean Francois de Sant Lambert. The 43-year-old Emile became pregnant, a condition that caused her anxiety, as she confided in friends, that she did not think she would survive the birth. She was correct. On September 3, 1749, Emilie gave birth to her final child, Stanislas Adelaide Du Chatelet– and died of a pulmonary embolism a week later.